KJR Studios
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA
© Kameelah Janan Rasheed. All rights reserved.
Source: Gregg Richards
Her work across art, pedagogy, and emerging technologies has garnered numerous honors. In 2024, she was an Artes Mundi 11 Finalist and received a High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree. She received additional fellowship and awards from Working Artist (2023); Schering Stiftung (2022 Award for Artistic Research); Creative Capital Award (2022); anArtists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google (2022); and Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2021). Her work has also been presented across the world including the continents of North America, South American, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions as Studio Museum, Bronx Museum, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MASSMoCA, the Kitchen, and ICA Philadelphia among others.
She is represented by NOME Gallery in Berlin, Germany.
Having published half a dozen books as a second grader in East Palo Alto, Rasheed continues her love of publishing as the the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing imprint, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing imprint, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer.
With over 25 years of experience in teaching, facilitation, and mentorship, her students and co-learners have nurtured her practice. She is a full-time instructor at the Yale School of Art in the Sculpture Department where she facilitates the sculpture thesis course and publication; teaches studio and theory-based sculpture courses; and has designed a new course focused on text-based artists since the 1900s. Additionally, she has taught courses and workshops at the School for Poetic Computation focused on creative coding, writing, surveillance, AI and non-AI powered text generators, and pedagogy. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Barnard College - Columbia University, Cooper Union, and the School of Visual Arts. Since 2022, Rasheed has co-taught a writing and publishing intensive to Bennington College (formally affiliated with the University of the Arts) MFA dance students at the Institut Chorégraphique International (International Choreographic Institute) summer conference in Montpellier, France. In 2025, she will be a visiting faculty at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art.
In 2025, she was invited to deliver a lecture at the Chat Token Vector: Questioning Models of Language and Neo-Structuralism in AI symposium at Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She has given invited lectures, as a visiting artist, at Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, Rutgers University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Rice University, University of California at San Diego, University of Maryland, Northwestern University and more. She has also delivered a series of keynotes including the Information+ Conference (2021) Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference, as part of Printed Matter Art Book Fair (2022); and CODEX Foundation (2024). In 2021, she was invited to present at the Xerography: Women Artists 1965-1990 Symposium with the Getty Foundation and Institut National d’histoire de l’art in Paris, France. She serves on the boards of Printed Matter, Inc. and the Metropolitan New York Library Council.
Alongside her work within existing institutions, she experiments with institutional design and community building through the many projects she stewards through KJR Studios. She founded The Little Octopus School (est. 2024), a roaming learning laboratory and publishing imprint (Scratch Disks Full) rooted in play, curiosity, and collaboration. She is also the founder of Orange Tangent Study (est. 2020), a consultancy reimagining the design of learning experiences and dispersing over $10,000 in unrestricted microgrants for artists on the cusp of new ideas. In 2016, with the support of the Magnum Foundation, she founded Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive exploring Black spiritual practice in North America. By 2022, with funding from Creative Capital, Mapping the Spirit was absorbed into a larger project, Gather and Disperse, a hub that hosts her archival projects Mapping the Spirit (Black spiritual movements); Black Orbits (Black vernacular photographs of the late 19th and 20th century); Study East Palo Alto (Black education experiments in my hometown 1960-1983); Pressure on the Page (Black printed matter of the late 19th and 20th century); as well as two emerging collections: Foraging for Text and Seeking Soft Geometries.
Nurtured by a large and expressive family, her first and continuous guides are her parents and many brothers who encouraged her to pursue all of her intellectual interests. Rasheed also cites her middle school teachers, three Black educators — Mr. Barksdale, Ms. Vest, and Ms. Shootes as anchoring stewards in her learning journey. Rasheed earned a B.A. in the self-designed program of Public Policy - Africa/African Diaspora from Pomona College; during her time at Pomona, she was a 2006 Amy Biehl Fulbright Scholar to Johannesburg, South Africa, at the age of 20. Later, she earned her M.A. of Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University in 2008. Prior to teaching at colleges and universities, Rasheed spent fifteen years in secondary teaching and curriculum design. The amazing students she met during her five years of instruction taught her to see and feel more deeply.
In her free time, Rasheed regularly enjoys Japanese logic games (Sudoku, Kakoru, and Masyu), following the latest research on human and non-human perception, and dancing. Less regularly than she’d like, she enjoys powerlifting, improv, listening to the vinyl she inherited from her late grandmother, watching mystery-box television, and playing her theremin.