When Rasheed was twelve, she and her family were evicted from their home. For the following ten years, they moved between temporary shelters and motel rooms. During that time, Rasheed collected remnants from each of those places—artifacts of the trauma of displacement that led to her ongoing interest in practices of collection and archiving.

Rasheed’s works grapple with the complexities, slipperiness, and possibilities of language, drawing upon excerpts, combines, photocopies, and annotated fragments of letters and images. Through interests in literary theory, archives, ecosystems, and experimental writing, Rasheed seeks new ways of narrating the Black experience outside of traditional, linear, historical structures. As such, her texts become removed from the page, taking on architectural forms and stretched to the point of illegibility. Rasheed says, “A text itself is never finished; each time we read something, we’re either annotating on the page or annotating in our brain and creating literally a new text.”1

Rasheed obtained a BA from Pomona College and an MA from Stanford University. In 2006 through 2007, She was an Amy Biehl United States Fulbright Scholar at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. In 2016, she founded Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive created to document the diversity and nuances of Black religious life in the United States. Rasheed has authored artist books including An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019). She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and a Creative Capital Award (2022). Her work has been featured in Studio Museum exhibitions such as Black: Color, Material, Concept (2015) and Radical Reading Room (2019).

1) “Kameelah Janan Rasheed,” Art21, accessed November 9, 2022, art21.org/artist/kameelah-janan-rasheed/.