Rev. Dr. Amy Steele serves as The Upper Room Executive Director of Program and Dean of The Upper Room Chapel. Prior to joining The Upper Room, Amy served as the assistant dean for student affairs and community life at Vanderbilt Divinity School for 10 years. Since 2019, she has become a vital partner to The Upper Room: co-sponsoring an event to honor Howard Thurman, offering Centering Prayer to the Vanderbilt Divinity School community, and most recently providing leadership in the Chapel, eCourses, and as a keynote speaker for the Resilience event. She is an administrator and womanist social ethicist who has deep commitments to areas of social ethics, spirituality, philosophical hermeneutics, homiletics, aesthetics, and pragmatic theology.
She is an ordained Baptist minister who earned two degrees from Vanderbilt University (2012 and 2000 respectively), the Doctor of Philosophy in Religion (Ethics and Society) and the Master of Divinity with a certificate in Black Church Studies. Rev. Dr. Steele’s doctoral dissertation is titled, “The Mystical Aesthetic: Howard Thurman and the Art of Meaning.” She lives in the Nashville area with her son and her niece and nephew.