Kameelah Janan Rasheed (NY)

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) is a research-based conceptual artist, writer and educator. A Brooklyn-based artist-archivist, her work reckons with the complexity of memory, ritual, historiography, and archival practices as they relate to the construction of both personal and social histories. She creates archival installations, prose, conceptual poems, text-based prints, photographs, audio mixes, and public programming that consider the archive as a site of agency to explore our active and passive roles in both the production and consumption of hermetic private histories as well as larger public histories.

A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Rasheed holds an Ed.M (2008) in Secondary Education from Stanford University as well as a BA (2006) in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College.

Currently, she is the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine and a contributing editor at The New Inquiry. In the past, she has been a museum educator at Brooklyn Museum, worked as a member of East Palo Alto's city planning commission and taught social studies to high school students.

For more information about Kameelah and their work, please visit kameelahr.com

References by the Artist 

1.  João Costa Vargas and Joy A. James, Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization or (Audio File version)

2.  "The Freedmen's Book" by Lydia Maria Child, pages 269-276. Written and compiled by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and published in 1865, "The Freedmen's Books" is a compilation of short stories, prayers, and biographies authored by noted abolitionists and former slaves.