Based in St. Louis, MO, De Nichols serves as the Director & Principal Designer of Civic Creatives, an impact design studio that partners with communities to develop interactive experiences, tools, and initiatives that confront issues of racial inequity, social division, food insecurity, and civic disengagement.

As a cultural producer, Nichols creates digital media and visual artwork that extends the impact of her design practice. She is the visioning artist of the Mirror Casket (2014), a sculpture and performance created as protest art during the 2014 Ferguson uprising, which was collected by the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum for African-American History and Culture in 2016. Her projects such as Sticky Note to Self, Amongst Womxn (2016), and Not Just Anybody integrate art and social media to help audiences reflect and respond to cultural microagressions facing women, queer communities, and people of color. Through her leadership with these and other works, Nichols has been deemed a national Ideas that Matter recipient, a two-time Clinton Global Initiative innovator, and a St. Louis Visionary for her community impact. Most recently, she was named a 2017 Citizen Artist Fellow of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts with mentorship by esteemed cellist and educator, Yo Yo Ma.

Nichols is a national keynote presenter and lecturer, and she leads as the youngest member of the Board of Directors for Forward through Ferguson, the non-profit developed to hold the St. Louis region accountable to racial equity following the 2014 murder of Michael Brown. She chairs the Board of Directors for Creative Reaction Lab, which educates and equips Black and Latinx youth to foster design-based approaches to racial issues within schools and neighborhoods across the United States.

Nichols is an alum of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, where she specialized in communication design, social entrepreneurship, and socio-economic development. She is a John B. Ervin Scholar, Brown Scholar, and Enterprise-Rent-a-Car Scholar. Her efforts have been supported by the Clinton Global Initiative, Women’s Caucus for Art, Gephardt Institute for Public Service, Ideas that Matters, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, StartingBloc Fellowship for Social Innovation, Points of Light Civic Accelerator, Microsoft YouthSpark, and AshokaU Changemakers.