Lavett Ballard is an artist, art historian, curator, and author. She holds a dual Bachelor’s in Studio Art and Art History with a minor in Museum Studies from Rutgers University. And she is a recent graduate with her MFA in Studio Art from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, public and private institutions nationwide. She’s a regional finalist for both New York & Philadelphia for the Bombay Artisan Emerging Artist competition. Ballard has had the honor of having her art included in literary, film, theater productions. Lavett Ballard looks at her art as a diverse visual narrative of people of African descent within a historical folk context. Her newest body of work, uses formal elements of paint, charcoal, oil pastel, and collage, deconstructed, and layered on reclaimed large and small aged wood fences. The use of fences is a symbolic reference to how fences keep people in and out, just as racial and gender identities can do the same socially.