Theatre artist, writer, and filmmaker Shontina Vernon has, for the past decade, worked using multi-media, music, and performance to explore black cultural histories, intergenerational legacies around trauma, and queerness. Recent works include Black Spring, a video installation investigating the way hostile environments act on black identity; “GRRRL Justice,” an experimental series of shorts looking at the resistance and liberatory practices of girls and queer youth of color impacted by the juvenile justice system; and Her Black Body Politic, a community devised spoken word and movement piece exploring the politics of the black female body and the way it occupies literal and poetic space. She is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2019 City Artist Grant Recipient, and a Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellow. Vernon serves as creative director of the Visionary Justice StoryLab, a social impact collective evolving story-, media-, and performance-based racial and healing justice practices for communities of color. She is currently developing her first full-length feature film titled Last Kind Words, and Forging Ahead, a multimedia performance exploring the impact of incarceration on identity and sense of belonging that she worked on at MacDowell.
Shontina Vernon
Studios
New Jersey
Shontina Vernon worked in the New Jersey studio.
The yellow clapboard New Jersey Studio, located on a grassy, sloping site, was funded by the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs and built as an exact replica of Monday Music Studio (1913). The studio’s porch rests on fieldstone piers that increase in height as the ground slopes to the west. Like Monday Music Studio, New Jersey…