about dr. teddy raShaan

dr. teddy raShaan is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, curator, and cultural preservationist who architects spaces and experiences where Black life is witnessed, preserved, and honored. his work sits at the intersection of storytelling, curation, and spatial design—excavating how communities of color build power, meaning, and futures through narrative. as an artist of space and place, raShaan refuses extraction, instead demanding that marginalized voices be centered as the foundation of how we understand culture, survival, and freedom.

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at the core of raShaan's practice is sitting with people and listening to their stories—a methodology shaped by years as a K-12 educator and prison chaplain. in the classroom, he learned how to create conditions where young people could speak their truths, where education became an act of witnessing rather than extraction. as a prison chaplain, he sat with incarcerated people navigating survival, faith, and meaning in spaces designed to silence them. these roles taught him that listening is a spiritual practice, that documentation is an act of justice, and that the most marginalized voices often hold the deepest wisdom about power, resilience, and freedom.

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he has conducted more than 150 interviews globally—with entertainers, activists, faith leaders, business executives, artists, and everyday people navigating life, faith, and lived experience. these conversations are acts of witnessing and documentation, capturing voices that have been historically marginalized or erased. raShaan transforms these interviews into cinematic storytelling, turning intimate conversations into work that centers the people he sits with and honors their narratives as essential to how we understand power, culture, and survival.

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as curator of religion at the smithsonian national museum of African american history and culture, raShaan has pioneered innovative projects that capture and preserve Black spiritual and religious life in the Americas. he created the museum's first webseries, gOD-Talk: a Black millennial and faith conversation, a studio-produced webseries tour filmed across LA, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans. the series explored various topics pertaining to Black millennials and faith—hip hop, gender and sexuality, economics, and justice—and won 36 awards. the project then expanded into a feature film, also titled gOD-Talk, that followed the lives of seven Black millennials (atheist, buddhist, christian, muslim, and spiritualist) exploring how they reimagine faith in the 21st century. the feature film won eight awards, was selected for 10+ film festivals, and won best lgbtqia film. together, these projects solidified raShaan's voice as a cultural moderator capable of holding space for pluralistic, nuanced dialogue on faith, identity, and power.

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his curatorial innovation extends into digital preservation and augmented reality. he curated "jesus' hair like wool," the museum's first digital exhibition featuring an AR experience exploring contemporary and historical depictions of Black messiahs within american religion and popular culture. this work included his leadership in preserving and digitizing akili ron anderson's last supper sculpture (created 1982, rediscovered 2019), now available as a 3D AR experience that allows viewers to project the artwork into their own spaces. his documentary work extends directly from these curatorial projects—translating institutional innovation into cinematic storytelling.

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Currently, teddy is producing two film projects for the smithsonian. where she leads is a six-part docuseries centering Black women as spiritual and religious authorities, exploring how Black women navigate faith, power, and leadership across traditions and generations. (hush) harbor is a historical narrative film that follows a Black woman protagonist as she wields pluralistic faith—drawing on African diasporic traditions, Christianity, and ancestral memory—to claim freedom and power on a plantation. 

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his forthcoming documentary two to too addresses literacy inequities facing Black men, extending his commitment to centering marginalized voices and investigating systemic barriers. as a journalist, his strength lies in allowing people to tell their own stories, investigating and uncovering truths, and creating space for nuance. what grounds this work is his practice as a theologian and spiritual leader—a lens he brings to every conversation, regardless of topic. his theological training enables him to ask deeper questions about meaning, power, and survival, making his journalism an act of witnessing and truth-telling rooted in spiritual accountability.

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beyond his curatorial and filmmaking work, dr. raShaan founded art like me inc., a 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to empower Black and brown boys and men to cultivate emotional intelligence through art and culture. one of the organization's signature programs gifts art prints by established visual artists to boys (newborn through 12th grade) for free, breaking systemic inequities through cultural access and representation. through art like me, he wrote and directed the animated short film like me, releasing summer 2026, which centers Black and Brown boyhood as worthy of preservation and celebration.

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raShaan's curatorial practice extends beyond exhibitions and into the architecture of space itself. he understands that where culture lives matters as much as what culture is preserved—that intentional spaces become containers for meaning-making, connection, and collective memory. opening his first curated space in atlanta, raShaan is designing a third space within livable space: an archiving cultural sanctuary for artists, creatives, and artistic patrons to gather, create, and witness one another's work.

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educated at hampton university (ba), princeton theological seminary (mdiv), and fordham university (phd), raShaan's formal training in English, journalism, religious studies, education, and philosophy is inseparable from his lived professional experience. as a high school English teacher, he learned that language is power and that education is an act of witnessing—not extraction. as a prison chaplain, he deepened his understanding that marginalized voices hold the deepest wisdom about survival, resilience, and freedom. his c-suite leadership in nonprofit management and higher education administration taught him how to build movements and operate at institutional scale, translating vision into sustainable infrastructure. this combination of rigorous intellectual training and real-world institutional practice is what gives dr. raShaan his unique authority as curator, filmmaker, and cultural preservationist. he brings both the theoretical framework and the lived experience to every space he enters. 

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raShaan hails from winston-salem, north carolina, and now calls baltimore and atlanta home.