J. Rycheal Lester-Peters is an artist, storyteller, cultural worker, and community-centered creative serving as Interim Marketing Director at LANGSTON. Their work spans photography, film, performance, and writing, engaging Black interiority, memory, sovereignty, grief, and joy through a practice that treats storytelling as both witness and liberatory act. Born and raised in Georgia and based in Seattle, J. Rycheal’s work is shaped by Black Southern oral traditions and ancestral lineages connecting both the American South and the Pacific Northwest, including ties to the indigenous Kwakwaka’wakw people. After a few years back in the South reconnecting with self, lineage, and creative practice, they return to Seattle, where they first relocated in 2014, with a renewed commitment to Black cultural work and community storytelling.

Their work has been exhibited and presented at institutions including the Northwest African American Museum, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and the historic Douglass Theatre in Georgia, founded by their fourth great-grandfather in 1920. Alongside their artistic practice, J. brings more than a decade of experience in creative leadership, audience development, and narrative strategy across cultural and organizational spaces, including leadership experience at Amazon and selection to the Harvard Business School Young American Leaders Program. Across disciplines, their work is concerned with how memory, culture, and imagination shape collective possibility.