Miatta Kawinzi

Miatta Kawinzi is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. Her research-informed practice explores cultural hybridity, memory, freedom dreaming, and ecologies of possibility within inner and outer landscapes. Her practice spans installation, sculpture, still and moving images, sound, painting, and poetics. She is interested in illuminating African/Diasporic points of connection, transformation, and continuity across place, space, and time. Of Liberian and Kenyan heritage, Kawinzi was raised in the South and is based in NYC.

Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon and CUE Art Foundation in New York, and group presentations at Anthology Film Archives, the Africa Center, PS122 Gallery, and the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC); Knoxville Museum of Art (TN); Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI); Pan African Film Festival with LACMA, and ICA Los Angeles (CA); Houston Museum of African American Culture (TX); New Orleans Film Festival (LA); and Des Moines Art Center (IA). Kawinzi’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, Harpo Foundation, Artadia, Queer|Art, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Select residencies/fellowships include Bemis Center (Omaha NE), G.A.S. Foundation with Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Lagos, Nigeria), Àsìkò Art School (Cairo, Egypt), Smack Mellon (NYC), MacDowell (NH), Residency Unlimited (NYC), Cité internationale des arts (Paris, France), SOMA Summer (Mexico City, Mexico), and the Bag Factory (Johannesburg, South Africa). Her work is included in collections at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Harlem Postcards, NYC), Art Connects New York, and Art in Embassies (Liberia). Her practice has received press in Hyperallergic, Filmmaker Magazine, and MoMA Magazine. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College. She is currently on faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York.