Lizzy Cooper Davis, PhD, is an artist and scholar interested in how the arts can facilitate community conversation, resistance, and change. Particularly focused on black freedom movements, she has conducted research in Cuba, Brazil, and New Orleans, and her current project examines the cultural workers of the civil rights era. She has has performed nationally as an actor, trained with Augusto and Julian Boal and used their methods in multiple settings, and worked at the intersection of arts and community justice with Jacob’s Pillow, ArtsEmerson, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Liz Lerman, and Anna Deavere Smith. Lizzy co-edited Enacting Pleasure: Artists and Scholars Respond to Carol Gilligan's Map of Love (2010), her work on the freedom songs of the civil rights movement appeared in the roots music journal "No Depression," and she contributed a chapter on the Free Southern Theater's Story Circle methodology to Creating Space for Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education (Stylus, 2019). Lizzy teaches at Emerson College.