Liz Laribee is a Programs and Partnerships Librarian with Arlington Public Library. In 2022 her team received the County Manager Excellence Award for their work in working with community partners to tell Arlington's story- specifically through the Reecuentro archives initiative to capture Latinx stories, and the Little Saigon walking tour through Clarendon to highlight the Vietnamese immigrant history in that neighborhood. Formerly as an Education Specialist for the Smithsonian Libraries, Liz developed programs designed to create digital access to Smithsonian artifacts and historical books, tailored to diverse audiences.
Before receiving her Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland, Liz was a self-taught artist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. While there, Liz launched The MakeSpace Arts Collective, Sprocket Mural Arts, and Dauphin County Lawyers for the Arts. For her arts advocacy work, she received the Spectrum Arts Award, the YWCA Emerging Leader Award, and the title of Artist in Residence for the City of Harrisburg. Her illustration work has appeared in Colonial Comics (Fulcrum, 2018) and Occasionally Accurate Science (Nomadic Press, 2019). For her feminist blog Saved By the bell hooks, she gained mentions and interviews in The New York Times, Slate, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, ColorLines, and the American Library Association. Her work was the subject of "The Subversive Remix Rhetoric of Saved By The Bell Hooks", a paper by academic Kyle Larson.
Liz is on the Board of the Dream Project, a Virginia non-profit organization that empowers students whose immigration status creates barriers to education by working with them to access and succeed in college through scholarships, mentoring, family engagement, and advocacy.
She lives in Arlington, happily.