b. 1985, East Palo Alto, California, US

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose expansive practice explores the poetics and politics of knowledge production, Black epistemologies, and the possibilities of language. Describing herself as a “learner,” Rasheed engages with text across various mediums to examine how meaning is constructed, interpreted, and disseminated. For her, reading and writing are not passive acts but generative processes—ways of thinking, questioning, and becoming. This perspective informs her understanding of text as a mutable, living organism that resists fixity and invites constant iteration and intervention. Her practice unfolds across an ecosystem of provisional projects and experiments: large-scale text-banner installations, lecture-performances, publications, sound works, library interventions, xeroxed collages, and other forms yet to be determined.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed has presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; REDCAT, Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including the Autostrada Biennale, Prizren; Urbane Künste Ruhr, Bochum; Front Triennale, Cleveland; Athens Biennale; and Prospect New Orleans. She has previously exhibited her work at Kunstverein Hannover; the Glasgow International; Kunsthalle Wien Future Generation Exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale; the Brooklyn Museum; The New Museum, New York; MASS MoCA, North Adams; Studio Museum in Harlem; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; Brooklyn Public Library, among others. Rasheed is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts and recipient of both the 2022 Creative Capital Award and the Schering Stiftung Prize for Artistic Research.