Meet Erika
Our Principal Historian Archivist & Curator
Erika Brayboy Collier is a dynamic and well cultured Atlanta-based historian/archivist, curator, and researcher. Being a “third culture kid,” Erika had frequented five countries and spoken multiple languages before she came face-to-face with the U.S. American realities of her cultural identity and heritage. She was a ten-year-old moving back to the U.S.A., the country she had left at just three years old (from St. Louis, MO.) and being planted firmly in Atlanta, GA in 1992, her first non-traveling home.
History had always been her favorite subject, and February was her favorite month in military family schools across Germany, but it was the immediate immersion into the rich cultural traditions of a Black church in the southeast Atlanta neighborhood of Thomasville Heights, that prompted her curiosity about the seemingly hidden legacies and experiences of her own people in the United States. For the first time, she was exposed to critical U.S. cultural figures, movements and institutions that she had never learned of in her favorite history classes.
A plethora of real-life experiences in Georgia such as being commissioned by a mayor and her NJROTC unit to lead the mapping of a historic southern cemetery at age 16, regretfully rejecting a full scholarship to an Atlanta HBCU at age 18, and being crowned the first black Miss Georgia Southern University at age 20, shed so much light on the gaping holes in her historical miseducation, that she was deeply embarrassed. Consequently, she was deeply convicted to spend the rest of her life learning, embracing and sharing more academically honest and integrated historical narratives.
Erika firmly believes that no matter the historical conditions or differences of our moral, social or political pasts, dignified history is told through the academically honest lense and context provided by proper foundations in population data. In short, her work is centered in the idea of innate human dignity.
Erika received a B.A. in Spanish with a minor in Political Science from Georgia Southern University. She has served as an educator in Georgia Public Schools (15 years), founded and directed an Atlanta-based classical home-schooling community (3 years), served on the Emory University Carlos Museum Teachers Council (4 years), currently serves Atlanta Public Schools as Historian Archivist + Curator (her research being the catalyst in the initiation of the district’s 150th anniversary celebration). She is the founder of The Cascade, a neighborhood historic preservation brand in Southwest Atlanta. She recently founded the Atlanta Humanities Society, a nonprofit organization committed to preserving and promoting the human experience through humanities projects and programming.
Erika enjoys family read-a-louds, hikes, bird and deer watching, singing, and writing poetry. She and her husband are proud Atlanta residents, raising their six children in their favorite city.