zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal
Desire, self-realization, autonomy, and longing are foundational to zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal. These themes emerge through her photographic images, video assemblage, and works on paper as a means to process her relationships to history, queerness, family, interiority, and belonging. Within this making process, she situates herself within a specific gaze that honors Black interiority. Her work is anchored by a commitment to fostering a different kind of gaze—a gaze that transcends the conventional and engages with empathy, desire, love, queer identity, family, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. dumas-o’neal has exhibited her work at Indiana University, South Bend Museum of Art, and Arts and Public Life, Washington Park Arts Incubator, among other notable spaces. She is currently an Albertine Foundation Laureate Awardee in collaboration with Villa Albertine. She is the co-founder of Concerned Black Image Makers (CBIM): a collective of Black artists, thinkers, and curators that prioritize shared experiences and concerns by lens based artists of the Black diaspora.
Photo Credit: Jordan Campbell