Born 1985, California, US

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NYC. Rasheed’s practice takes form across an ecosystem of provisional projects and experiments: large-scale text-banner installations, lecture performances, publications, sound works, library interventions, and xeroxed “architecturally-scaled collages” (Frieze, 2018), and other forms yet to be determined. Her installations act as a means of radical self-publishing, where words are taken off the page to interact materially with architecture, stretched or fragmented “to the edge of legibility” (Artforum, 2017). With interests in intertextuality, literacy, archiving, and ecology, Rasheed explores Black experimental poetics, vernaculars, and non-linearity as ways of narrating Black experience and thinking about modes of learning/unlearning. The artist is the founder of Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive that documents Black spiritual life in the US through interviews, photography, video, and ephemera.

In 2022, Rasheed received her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe at the Kunstverein Hannover. She recently participated in the Front Triennale, Athens Biennale, and Prospect New Orleans. Rasheed has previously exhibited her work at 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; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; Brooklyn Public Library, among others. Rasheed received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded a Creative Capital Grant and the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The New York Times, Triple Canopy, and others. She is the author of two artist books: No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019) and An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019). Since 2018 she has collaborated with The Shed, New York, for the young person’s creative program DIS OBEY. Shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize (2017) and the recipient of many art awards and residencies, Rasheed is currently on the faculty of the MFA Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts, NYC. In 2021 she joined the Printed Matter Inc. board and was nominated Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.