Hello, I’m Rayshauna Gray — an entrepreneur, writer, and public historian whose work sits at the intersection of narrative design, equity-centered research, public policy, and institutional accountability.

I am the creator of The Heart Work, a reflective framework and facilitated workshop series that helps people examine how values and imposter syndrome shape their personal, professional, and cultural worlds. I also designed the Modus Operandi Deck for meaningful solo and group reflection, a 72-card tool available in card, Braille, and digital formats (via Deckible, Google Play, and the App Store), used by individuals, families, friends, educators, nonprofits, companies, and community groups.

Across projects, I have contributed to public history work at two International Coalition of Sites of Conscience member sites. As a Project Historian for the Black History at the Vassall Estate / Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters Special History Study, I was part of a research team uncovering centuries of enslavement, resistance, family networks, and migration across the United States, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, England, Liberia, Ghana, and Canada. The project — sponsored by the National Park Service and National Council on Public History — includes deep collaboration with nearly forty living descendants and over thirty archival experts in five countries.

With the National Public Housing Museum, I extend this commitment into oral history, archival stewardship, and housing justice. As a Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History graduate and Archive Working Group member, I support the ethical collection, description, preservation, and interpretation of public housing memory — work rooted in dignity, belonging, family, policy, and cultural inheritance. I also serve on the American Association for State and Local History-National Council on Public History Semiquincentennial Joint Conference Program Committee and participate in the Public Historians and the Housing Crisis working group.

Across the past decade, I have worked at the nexus of public history, higher education, policy, and digital humanities. My career has included strategy roles with early-stage startups, program management for global learning initiatives, and content curation and programming for cultural institutions including the Cambridge Historical Society, the Museum of African American History - Boston & Nantucket, and the Boston Book Festival.

My work has also expanded across Harvard and MIT, where I supported the development of emerging initiatives, authored public-facing scholarship, and contributed to institutional histories. As a researcher with Tufts University’s Center for the Study of Race & Democracy, I helped map 400 years of African American history through the African American Trail Project. Highlights also include legislative work on dozens of bills with the National Organization for Women, a fellowship at Harvard’s History Design Studio (housed within the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research), and participation in THREAD at Yale, where I workshopped “Chiasmus,” an essay tracing 200 years of my family’s history, which was subsequently published in Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2017).

You can learn more about my work here.