Dr. Chanel Beebe

Artist, Writer, Educator, Engineer, Small Business Owner, Researcher, Activist

Hometown: Detroit, MI

Pronouns: she, her, hers

Gender Identity: Woman, Two-Spirited

Ethnicity: African American, Indigenous

Dr. Chanel Beebe is a Detroit-born interdisciplinary artist, educator, researcher, and writer whose work lives at the intersection of creativity, community, and systems transformation. As the visionary Founder and CEO of Beebe Arts LLC, she blends abstract painting, photography, design, writing, and participatory research into a practice that is as expressive as it is strategic.

Dr. Beebe’s artwork—spanning oils, acrylics, photo-based mixed media, and digital design—explores themes of memory, identity, labor, and liberation. Her pieces are both deeply personal and socially resonant, fueling critical conversations about Blackness, belonging, and the emotional undercurrents of modern life. Her exhibitions, including Soulful Symbolism and Brush & Focus, invite viewers not only to observe but also to feel, question, and connect.

Holding degrees from the University of Michigan (B.S.) and Purdue University (M.S., Ph.D.), Dr. Beebe’s academic and artistic work are grounded in her commitment to justice and equity. A Gates Millennium Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow, she has led qualitative research projects focused on socially engaged design, identity formation in tech education, and liberatory learning models. Her dissertation, But What Does It Mean to the People Who Matter?, investigates meaning-making in engineering outreach through a critical, community-informed lens.

As an Intermittent Lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Dr. Beebe teaches courses like Urban Technology 210 - Listening, guiding students through identity-driven design research and social inquiry. She also leads the youth research initiative CS4Detroit and supports undergraduate mentorship through UROP and various youth interning and apprenticeship opportunities.

Whether through her Cultural Design Marathon, commissioned workshops, consulting services, or publishing guidance, Chanel cultivates spaces where art, data, and dialogue intersect. Her work has been featured in Bitten Magazine, exhibitions across Detroit and beyond, and used as a tool for community healing, institutional change, and personal reflection.

From classrooms to canvases, boardrooms to block parties, Dr. Chanel Beebe challenges systems, nurtures clarity, and offers liberatory ways of seeing, learning, and building.