[1] Lewis was co-founding director of Fashion Moda in New York, where he curated and mounted numerous exhibitions and performance events.
[2] He also early on has been associated with Colab and ABC No Rio[3][4] and appeared in the 1983 seminal American hip hop film Wild Style.
In 2001, he became the Dean of the School of Art & Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
[6] He became the Dean of Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine in 2010[7][5] until resigning.
Currently, he is president of the Noah Purifoy Foundation located in Joshua Tree, California and is on the Board of Directors for Project Hope Alliance (whose mission is to end homelessness) and California Lawyers for the Arts.