liquid blackness
Music Video As Black Art: Claiming the B-Side
Presenter Bios
Elissa Blount Moorhead is an artist exploring the poetics of quotidian Black life through film. Some projects she co-directed; Jay Z's 4:44 long form video ( w/ Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed) and Back and Song, (with Bradford Young) an experimental 4-channel film. She wrote and directed an episode of PBS/Firelight Media’s new Masters in the Making series. She created and directed the 3D mapping and augmented reality installation called As of A Now. She is the author of P is for Pussy, a illustrated “children’s” humor book and is featured in the anthology; How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance.(2019)She was awarded the Comedy Central -Sundance Award, USA Artist Fellowship, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fellowship, Ford Foundation /Just Films/Fellowship, The Baker Award, and the Creative Capital Award. She is the creator of fiftyTWO, an episodic dramedy developed at the 2020 Sundance Episodic Lab., She created and directed a 3D mapping and Augmented Reality installation As of A Now , directed PBS' Apologue for the Darkest Gods, MTV's 9 Things, and co- director of Jay Z's 4:44 and 4-channel film installation, Back And Song with co-director Bradford Young. She is the author of P is for Pussy, an illustrated “children’s” humor book and is featured in the new anthology; How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance.
Craig Dongoski is a Full Professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia USA. Dongoski’s has been exploring and articulating the mark in its most basic form (both graphically and aurally) for much of his career. The intention is that through varied interpretations of the marks that a contribution is made to the art historical dialogue within the origin of human expression. Professor Dongoski has performed and produced work each year on the island of Kefalonia, Greece since 2011. He also has a considerable body of work. Most recently a one-artist exhibition he presented The Primates NoteBook, employing his drawing-sound experiments and innovations in tandem with chimpanzees through the Language Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Dongoski was Invited Lecturer, Dolphinity: International Symposium on Dolphin Consciousness • Dolphin Embassy • Tenerife, Canary Islands. And in 2016 Invited Lecturer, CAIROTRONICA; International Symposium on Electronic Arts (in cooperation with The Planetary Collegium); Palace of the Arts • Cairo, Egypt. Most recently he was included in the Timeless Fragments Group Exhibition in Brindisi, Italy. And The Pulled Edition at Tong-In Gallery in Seoul, Korea. He was also selected to participate in the GATHERED Exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art-Georgia.
He was twice nominated for a Ford/Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in New Media. Dongoski also has released CD’s on Hydra Head Records and Aucourant Records. In 2015 he directed an important improvisation collaboration with filmmaker Larry Clark resulting in a limited press LP entitled Drawing Through. He is represented by WhiteSpace Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia and James Gallery Pittsburgh, PA
Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing the foremost public art programme in the UK, and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is the curator of exhibitions including, most recently, In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, London, awarded the Association for Art History’s Curatorial Prize for Exhibitions 2023, and author of books including Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, and Africa State of Mind, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize and In the Black Fantastic, a finalist for the 2023 Locus Awards. Described by The Guardian as a ‘cultural polymath’, he is the writer and presenter of documentaries including the BBC film Dark Matter: A History of the Afrofuture, the Tate Modern film series, Exploring the Black Atlantic, and the BBC Radio 4 series White Mischief. He has contributed to books on artists including Mark Bradford, Kehinde Wiley, Chris Ofili, John Akomfrah and Wangechi Mutu and his writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Esquire and Wired. He holds an honorary doctorate from London Metropolitan University.
Stefano Harney is Professor of Transversal Aesthetics at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. He is also Honorary Professor at the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. With Fred Moten he is author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and All Incomplete (2021). He is a member of a number of collectives, including Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, Ground Provisions, and School for Study.
Shawn Peters is a cinematographer and storyteller represented by the William Morris Agency, listed as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces in Independent Film in 2016, and is a Sundance Institute Fellow for 2016. Parts of his work can be seen at www.shawnpeters.com. He started shooting music videos for artists like Pharoahe Monch, Blitz the Ambassador, Michelle Williams, Bilal, and Alicia Keys. That led to commercial and Narrative work with directors Ramin Bahrani, AG Rojas, Arthur Jafa, Daniel Wolfe, Bradford Young, Rhys Ernst, and Terence Nance. Film’s that Shawn has worked on have premiered at Sundance, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. Some of Shawn’s narrative work includes the films “Goldie,” for VICE Features and “Adam,” produced by James Schamus, “Really Love” for Charles King’s MACRO and the Peabody Award-winning HBO television series, “Random Acts of Flyness,” produced and directed by Terence Nance. Shawn created the look for the recently released limited series The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey staring Samuel Jackson and Dominque Fishback for APPLE TV, written by Walter Mosley and directed by Ramin Bahrani, Debbie Allen, Hanele Culpepper, and Guillermo Navaro. Shawn was DP on episodes 1,3,6 of the six-episode series. Shawn and Terence Nance worked on the Season 2 of Random Acts of Flyness on HBO. Shawn is currently the pilot DP for the new Warner Brothers series The Emperor of Ocean Park, based on the novel by Stephen L. Carter.
Michele Prettyman was an early figure in the liquid blackness research project and currently serves on its editorial board. A scholar of black cinema and visual culture, she is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University, and her research explores Black aesthetic and cultural histories, experimental modes of filmmaking and storytelling, and blackness at the intersection of aesthetics and spirituality. She has a forthcoming essay titled “Music in the Air: Spirituality and Revival in Summer of Soul (... Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised which will appear in Summer of Soul: A Docalogue and a recently released essay in the anthology Black Cinema & Visual Culture: Art and Politics in the 21st Century titled, “Out of Form Into Being: Black Women Filmmakers and Experiments in Expansive Cinema. And last year our liquid blackness journal published her essay/interview on the work of Elissa Blount Moorhead “Doing It, Fluid: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the Making of a Moving Image Community.”
In 2019 Michele was named Artistic Director of the Tubman African American Museum’s inaugural film festival and she appears alongside Chuck D, the late John Singleton, and others in the documentary film, Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (2021) streaming now on Max. Michele is currently developing a short/feature film project titled “Lucy and the Fabulous Freemans” and she works to amplify the creative voices of others through her consulting company Daughters of Eve Media, which programs film events and provides a platform for storytellers of color.