Ayana V. Jackson

Jackson’s practice maps the ethical relationships between photographer, subject, and viewer, while exploring themes of race, gender, and reproduction. Her work examines myths of the Black diaspora and re-stages colonial archival images as a means of liberating the Black body. The titles of her series often nod to the stories she is reimagining. Jackson frequently embodies historical figures herself, using performance to guide their narratives and directly confront photography’s impact on the human body. 

Her work is collected by major international institutions, including the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Fondation Blachère (Bonnieux, France), the Musée de la Roche-sur-Yon (la Roche-sur-Yon, France), the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection (New York, NY), the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (Marrakech, Morocco), the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), the Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, NJ), the Sprengel Museum Hannover (Hanover, Germany), The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), and the Museo Nacional de Antropología (Madrid, Spain). 

Jackson was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship recipient (New York, NY) and received the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (Washington, DC) in 2018. In 2025, she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (New York, NY) and participated in the Joyner/Giuffrida Visiting Artists Program (Reno, NV) in 2026. In 2021, she founded STILL Art, an artist residency program in Johannesburg, South Africa, supporting emerging contemporary artists from Southern Africa across all disciplines. 

Her first major institutional exhibition, From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya, opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington, DC) in 2023. The exhibition will travel to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC, Canada) in 2026, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (Detroit, MI) in 2027, and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (Atlanta, GA) in 2028. Recent solo exhibitions include Nosce Te Ipsum: Membrum Fantasma at the Museo Nacional de Antropología (Madrid, Spain) and The Good News Is Delivered Not on Mountaintops but in Clearings at the Abbaye de Montmajour, as part of the Rencontres d’Arles 2026 (Arles, France).