Ashanti Chaplin

Director, Office of Public Art and Community Partnerships, City of Tulsa

Ashanti Chaplin is the Director of the Office of Public Art and Community Partnerships for the City of Tulsa. She is dedicated to developing frameworks that embed art, cultural memory, collective imagination, and civic belonging into public life. She is the Co-Founder of Central Standard—a contemporary art platform positioning Tulsa as a site of rigorous artistic exchange across geographies. She holds an Ed.M. from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chaplin was the inaugural Curator of Public Engagement at Dia Art Foundation and is a 2021–2023 alum of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Her interdisciplinary art practice engages the intersections of cultural production, folklore, performance, and design thinking. Grounded in place-based epistemologies and the knowledge teeming at the margins, she develops site-responsive projects that foster connection, honor layered histories, and treat the public sphere as a space for co-creation. Her leadership reflects a commitment to cultural equity, producing ecologies of participation and world-building rooted in radical imagination.

Photo credit: Jesse Garrett