Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and conceptual artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of the forthcoming book, To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press). She is a social anthropologist whose research and art focus specifically on social movements and cultural politics in the African Diaspora. As an artist, her work is concerned with understanding the ways that we inhabit place—through migration, ancestry, and shared social memory—and how places inhabit us. Her work focuses on examining these ancestral narratives and everyday ritual aesthetics among communities throughout the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis in North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. She works primarily in the fields of large-format photography, experimental video, installation, and performance art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica), Ashara Ekundayo Gallery (Oakland, USA), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, USA), and the SF LGBT Center (San Francisco, USA).

Image credits: Diamela Cutiño