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— Studio Artists: 2016

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Artist Website

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) is an artist, researcher, and educator. A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Rasheed holds an Ed.M in Secondary Education from Stanford University as well as a BA in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College. She has exhibited her work at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Weeksville Heritage Museum, Vox Populi Gallery, Project Row Houses, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Selected residencies, fellowships and honors include: Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Print Studio, Triple Canopy Commission at NYPL Labs, Artadia Grant, A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship, Queens Museum Jerome Fellowship, Process Space LMCC Residency, Art Matters Grant, Rema Hort Mann Grant, Working Classroom Teaching Artist Residency, The Laundromat Project Fellowship, Center for Photography at Woodstock Residency, etc. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Art 21, Wall Street Journal, ArtSlant, and Hyperallergic. Rasheed has spoken at SVA, Parsons, The New School, NYU, Columbia University, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, MoCADA, Schomburg Center, the Weeksville Heritage Center, and Interference Archive. Her writing has been published in The New Inquiry, Gawker, The Guardian, and Creative Time Reports.


Through immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, sound projects, and discursive programming, my work engages with both figurative and literal language to explore how we narrate the connections between the past, present, and future.  In my interdisciplinary and research ­intensive practice, I consider ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing. 

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