Chiquita Mullins Lee is an Arts Learning coordinator at the Ohio Arts Council where she coordinates the Arts Partnership, and Big Yellow School Bus grant programs that support quality arts experiences with an educational focus. She coordinates Ohio’s Poetry Out Loud program that engages high school students in poetry recitation. Chiquita has served as the chair and Mid-West regional coordinator for the Arts Education Working Group, in association with the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and has served on the Arts Education review panel for the National Endowment for the Arts.
She hosted the Emmy award-winning program, Traditions - Ohio HeritageFellows produced by Think-TV in Dayton which features the Ohio Arts Council’s annual Ohio Heritage Fellowship recipients. Chiquita won individual artist/excellence awards in fiction and playwriting from the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) and in fiction and nonfiction from OAC.
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She was writer-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia, where she was the winner of a Nellie Mae Rowe Fellowship. She has been published in national literary anthologies, including Fifth Wednesday Journal, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Falling Star, and Poetry in the Time of Coronavris, Volume Two. Chiquita was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is featured on the Long Street Cultural Wall in Columbus, Ohio.
She regularly writes and performs with Columbus-based Wild Women Writing, and recently performed in the plays, Twelve Hours and The Shakespeare Club by Dave Carley, Lost Lake by David Auburn, and she portrayed Venus in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. P.A.S.T. Productions staged her play, Strutt Regulars, and featured her in Sisters by Marsha Jackson. Her critically-acclaimed play, Pierce to the Soul, premiered at CATCO, Columbus’ professional equity theater and toured central Ohio with A Portable Theatre Company.
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Chiquita earned her B.A. from Vassar College, her M.A. from Ohio University, and a second master’s degree from Ohio State. A member of New Covenant Believers Church, Chiquita contributes to the worship arts ministry and leads Word Warriors creative writing ministry. Prior to her current position at the OAC, Chiquita served as producer-director at WDCN-TV Nashville, as program development coordinator for the National Black Programming Consortium, and as a teaching artist on the OAC artist roster with a focus on creative writing residencies.