Dr. Rebecca Friedman is the Founding Director of the Public Humanities Lab (PHL) and a Professor of History at Florida International University. She is a leading point of contact for the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs in Miami's arts and cultural communities. Her writings on public humanities have appeared in Humanities for All, The Metropole, Public Humanities and Wynwood Magazine.
Rebecca has co-led community driven story gathering and curation projects such as the Mellon-Funded Community Data Curation, Mellon-funded Commons for Justice: Race, Risk Resilience and Library of Congress funded Documenting Goombay and Little Bahamas of Coconut Grove. She worked with Florida Humanities on their inaugural Humanities Festival (2024) and secured the PHL’s participation in the 2025 Being Human Festival. She co-curated the exhibitions I Am Little Haiti at Green Space Miami as well as Bold. Black. Baldwin. and Love Never Dies at IPC ArtSpace in Little Haiti that were funded by the Pérez Family Foundation. Drawing from her curatorial experience, she is designing a Micro-credential on Visual Storytelling.
In partnership with the founder of the Iris Photo Collective, Carl Phillipe-Juste, she established iWitness Lunch Break, a monthly interdisciplinary program that brings together local artists, thought leaders, the university community and the public in celebration of the arts and humanities. A jazz lover, Rebecca, has worked with the Betsy Hotel on curating public programming across spaces in Miami. She has also partnered with the Florida Grand Opera to organize community engagement events that broaden the reach of this unique art form.
Rebecca has collaboratively secured over 10 million dollars in research and institution-building grants for the university including grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Perez Family Foundation, the Library of Congress, Florida Humanities, The Carrie Meek Foundation, Miami Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Green Family Foundation.
Rebecca serves as the Director of Research for the non-profit iWitness: IPC Institute for Visual Journalism. In this capacity, she oversees research projects on topics including immigration and climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean and global diasporas. She is a frequent guest lecturer for the Bowden Fellowship in the Humanities program at the Ranson Everglades School.