Lewis Jasen Miles is a consultant, creative, sociologist, and cultural worker whose work bridges the worlds of research, culture, strategy, and community. His work is concerned with textures, experiences, and effects: how people move through the world, how identities and communities take shape, and how power, place, and history structure everyday life. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His work has been supported by the Institute for Social Research, the Center for Engagement of Women, and the Social Science Research Council.
 

His current book project, Black to Mexico: Migration, Mobility, and the Quest for Freedom, explores Black American migration from the U.S. to Mexico through demographic analysis and deep qualitative inquiry. The project places Black American migration to Mexico within a long history of Black Americans interfacing with the global and crossing boundaries, showing how people navigate race, class, gender, citizenship, and belonging across borders.
 

With over a decade of international experience and travel to dozens of countries, Miles’s work is rooted in critical questions of race, mobility, power, and belonging. He moves between interviews and archives, collaborates across disciplines, publishes in academic journals, and produces artwork for exhibitions and commissions. Across these forms, his practice asks not only what systems produce, but how they feel, how they are lived, and what they make possible.
 

Miles is a multidisciplinary creative who loves narrative work, history, layers, textures, and dimension across art forms, especially music, painting, and design. When he is not crafting critiques, teaching, writing, or advising, you can find him DJing hypnotic and funky grooves or layering canvases in gouache and acrylic. Miles is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta and a native of North Carolina.