Heather Shirey, PhD, is a Professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her teaching and research focuses on race and identity, migrations and diasporas, and monuments, memorials, and street art in relation to public space and communities. Together with the Urban Art Mapping research team, she created and maintains the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Database, the Covid-19 Street Art Database, and other street art archives. These activist archives are driven by our understanding that it is crucial to document and analyze street art not only because of its ephemerality, but also because it captures the complexity of the experiences shaping the world today. Areas of inquiry include a study of creating, curating, and archiving as a form of activism and healing, and monuments and street art as modes of critical engagement in shared space. Dr. Shirey has published research on monuments in Brazil (African Arts, 2009) and in Great Britain (Open Cultural Studies, 2019). The Urban Art Mapping team’s latest research on street art is available in Urban Creativity Scientific Journal (2020), Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape (edited by Tijen Tunali, May 2021), NUART (May 2021), and the Journal of Folklore Research (forthcoming, 2023).