Nichols also serves as a Board of Directors member for Forward through Ferguson and chairs the Board of Directors for Creative Reaction Lab. She is a national public speaker on designing for civil rights and social justice, and is a 2016 recipient of the St. Louis Visionary Award for community impact in the arts. Most recently, she was named as a 2017 Citizen Artist Fellow for the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. De is an alumna of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a John B. Ervin Scholar, Brown Scholar, and Enterprise-Rent-a-Car Scholar. Her works have been supported by the Smithsonian National Museum for African-American History and Culture, 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, and AshokaU Changemakers.