Miatta Kawinzi is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and filmmaker of Kenyan-Liberian-American heritage. She works with sculptural installation, still and moving images, the voice and body, language, objects, space, and sound to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity, and culture through abstraction and poetics.
Her recent work explores hybridity within the African Diaspora and the liberatory and regenerative potential of gesture and softness, and she is currently working on a project surrounding notions of Black utopia.
Kawinzi's work has been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival, CUE Art Foundation, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of the Moving Image, and MoMA PopRally, among other spaces. She is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and the New York Artadia Award. Her previous residencies include the Bemis Center in Nebraska, Smack Mellon, the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and the Bag Factory in Johannesburg.
At MacDowell, she made progress on an ongoing research project surrounding historical entanglements between the U.S. and Liberia, and created new work in string sculpture, sound, photography, and video exploring the notion of liberation as an ongoing process in thinking through embodiment and ways of holding and being held by different internal and external landscapes.
