Lewis is the Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Before joining the Smithsonian Institution, he served as the founding Curator of the National Museum of African American Music.

His research is focused on late 20th-century jazz history, 19th-century African American music, and African American intellectual history. He presents lectures on these topics in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

His work as a scholar and curator has been featured on television and in major publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is also a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University, where he collaborates with Vanderbilt faculty and library staff as part of a NMAAM/VU partnership to build a world-class archive of African American music.

He has served as Historian and Curator for the Ed Johnson Memorial Project and as an Advisory Scholar for the Carnegie Hall Corporation. He worked as a research assistant at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

He received a doctorate in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia, where he was an Edgar Shannon Jefferson Fellow in Music.

Black Heritage, Black History Month, Music, Musician, History