Bio

Photographed in studio at Smack Mellon, May 2023, Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Etienne Frossard.

Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. Her work explores practices of re-imagining the self, identity, place, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Of Liberian and Kenyan heritage, Kawinzi was raised in Tennessee and Kentucky and has been based in Brooklyn, NY since 2010. Her work engages interior and exterior landscapes to illuminate themes of inter-connectivity, hybridity, and diaspora. She received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art and Cultural Theory from Hampshire College.

Recent exhibitions include "Numma Yah" solo at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2024), “Mami Wata Afrofuturism: 500 Years Back to the [Afro][F]uture” at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, TX (2024), “States of Becoming” touring with Independent Curators International 2022-27 and presented at Des Moines Art Center, IA (2024) and the Africa Center, NY (2022-23), “in pieces…” at PS122 Gallery, NY (2023), and “Soft is Strong,” solo at CUE Art Foundation, NY (2021). Kawinzi’s moving image work has screened at Microscope Gallery, NY (2023), the Pan African Film Festival with LACMA, CA (2023), Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI where she received the No. 1 African Film Award (2022), and New Orleans Film Festival, LA (2021). Her performance work has been presented by Times Square Arts, the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, and MoMA PopRally x Queens.

She is the recipient of the 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work, 2024 Creative Capital Award, 2023 Harpo Foundation Grant, 2021-23 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and 2021 New York Artadia Award. She has been awarded artist residencies in spaces including ISCP (NY), Residency Unlimited (NY), Smack Mellon (NY), MacDowell (NH), POV Spark with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture (NY, DC, and Venice, Italy), Cité internationale des arts (Paris, France, with LMCC), the Bemis Center (NE), SOMA Summer (Mexico City, Mexico), and the Bag Factory (Johannesburg, South Africa).

Kawinzi works as a Professor of Art and has taught at the School of Visual Arts (NY), Cornell University (NY), and Hampshire College (MA), and additionally works as an arts educator in community spaces, museums, and socially-engaged organizations throughout NYC and beyond.