Current / Featured​

​Exhibiting Artist — The Feminine Universe (group exhibition), opening March 13 @ 6 PM, Blue Galleries (Houston).

​Selected Publications

Babers, M.C. (2022). “Cowboy Cool: A Professional Black Cowboy’s Perspective.” Transforming Anthropology, 30: 150–164. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.1224 ​
Babers, Myeshia C. (2023). “Alternate Histories of the Cowboy Myth.” In Cowboy, ed. Isabel Venero, pp. 31–39. New York: Rizzoli.
Babers, Myeshia C. (2024). “Reclaiming Space and Memory: Black Cowboys and the Right to the City.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology.

Ways we can work together

If you’re here to collaborate, start here. Choose the lane that fits and I’ll route you to the right next step.

Museums + Orgs

Partnerships + cultural projects
Exhibitions, public programming, curriculum, research-creation, and memory infrastructure projects.

Talks / Screenings

Screenings, guest talks, and facilitated conversations grounded in care, clarity, and rigorous context.

How I Work

​I’m a cultural anthropologist, educator, and research-creator. My work sits at the intersection of kinship, land, labor, love, and power—how Black communities make knowledge, transmit it, and protect it when institutions don’t recognize it. I don’t just study culture; I build platforms that hold it: writing, teaching, documentary practice, exhibitions, and community-centered archiving.​

​I came up inside a familiar contradiction: people can carry expertise, lineage, and lived truth—and still be treated like it isn’t real unless it’s “approved.”

That gap between lived knowledge and credentialed permission became a through-line in my work. Not as an abstract debate, but as a practical reality that shapes who gets access, who gets cited, who gets funded, and whose stories get archived as “history” versus dismissed as “anecdote.”
​
So I started working like someone who refuses erasure: pay attention, document carefully, name the gate, and keep the record.

explore Projects

​If you want to see how this approach lives across forms—film, archive work, writing, and public projects—start here.

How I Show Up in Spaces

Over time, my practice expanded from analysis to infrastructure.
I developed a research-creation approach where production is not decoration—it’s a method. That means I build work that can move through multiple rooms without losing its integrity:
  • Academia, where rigor is the currency
  • Community spaces, where consent and care are the currency
  • Public culture, where clarity and story are the currency

​This is why my work lives across ethnography, teaching, documentary storytelling, exhibition-making, and legacy preservation. Different forms—same ethic: make the truth legible, durable, and accountable.
Mission statement:
My cultural work is stewardship: preserving, organizing, and activating living archives with care and accuracy—built through deep listening, the paper trail, and story-building.

Mission

I’m building a body of work—and a set of tools—that strengthen how we keep the record and transmit knowledge: in families, classrooms, archives, and public life. Not as nostalgia. As practice. As a strategy. As protection.

What I build

You’ll see my work through:
  • teaching and curriculum design grounded in Interdisciplinary pedagies that center on experiential learning practices.
  • research and writing on knowledge, gatekeeping, stewardship, and memory
  • documentary practice as a cultural method
  • exhibitions and public projects that treat devotion and intimacy as historical evidence

​If you’re looking to collaborate—teaching, speaking, workshops, documentary work, or exhibition projects —reach out through the contact page with what you’re building and what’s at stake.