Lavie Raven

Lavie Raven is a hip-hop educator and a high school social studies and English teacher from Chicago.  He has been teaching high school for 21 years, and doing hip-hop projects for 25 years. Lavie is the proud co-parent of three wonderful children, the oldest of which will be the fourth generation of school teachers in his family. As a teenager he became a graffiti writer and a rapper, and as an adult he continually works for the cultural growth and survival of the hip-hop arts. He loves doing community arts projects based in hip-hop, as young people are immediately attracted to the art-forms and the unique self-expression that comes from urban arts. 

Lavie has traveled nationally doing projects in New York City, Oakland, Pine Ridge, South Dakota.  Raven has also has done international hip-hop community arts projects in Poland, Costa Rica, Pine Ridge, British Columbia, and Palestine.  He recently received the Fulbright Distinguished Teacher's Award to study hip-hop and community activism in New Zealand.  He painted 33 murals while spending three months there in the Spring of 2017, half of which were with high school teens and elementary school students.  Lavie is presently completing his doctorate in Arts Education and Cultural Studies at Teachers' College at Columbia University in New York. 

Mural: Amazing Phases