zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
In collaboration with the Chicago Film Archives, composer and Black cultural historian Ayana Contreras
Video courtesy of the artist
Video courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal
zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal makes work to further understand how the specificity of her own lived experiences are connected to historical and contemporary movements that involve embodied knowledge production. She explores this through social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, drawing, and found images. She seeks to reinforce a different kind of gaze (and gazing) which she processes through empathy, desire, love, queer identity, family, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. Within her projects there's an overlying theme of trying to make sense of what and who she belongs to across time, location, and space.
Ultimately, she intends for her work to encourage ways of being and feeling beyond the systems we inhabit.
In addition to being a featured artist with Glass Breakfast, zakkiyah is a Co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers) and you can find zakkiyyah's work at zakkiyyahnajeebah.com.