She stewards KJR Studios , where she studies the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience across written , spoken , and visual communication systems. She makes ( language-saturated installations ) , ( film/video ) , ( performance-adjacent improvisational artist talks ) , ( libraries ) , ( software ) , ( paranormal fiction stories and loglines ) , ( learning environments ) , ( stand-up comedy sets ) , ( wayward translations ) , ( devotional kits ) , ( walking paths ) , ( theremin compositions ) , and ( photographs )



Biography

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) is a learner and a death doula in training.
roles

Her middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic trilateral root (J-N-N / جنان), evoking for me that which is unmoored, veiled, and wayward.
name meaning

She explores the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual systems of communication. In doing so, she considers the radical possibilities of noise, unintelligibility, discrepancy, and refusing frictionless perception. 

Across her practice at KJR Studios – an ecosystem spanning installation, publishing, pedagogy, performance, archival practice, and organizational care – she studies what regimes and institutions label “noise”: the communities, the bodies, the gestures, the utterances, and the forms of life that manage to exceed systems designed for certainty, extraction, and linearity. 
interests, concerns

She creates language-saturated installations, film/video (poems?), handheld physical and digital text objects to be read, performance-adjacent improvisational artist talks, archival collections, software, esoteric fiction stories and loglines, (intergenerational) learning environments, curricular materials, stand-up comedy sets, wayward translations, (unrecorded) infodump lectures about special interests, devotional kits, walking paths, theremin sound works, and photographs.
materialization of interests
Her work across many contexts and forms has been presented internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include High Line Art (2026), 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 at MoMA PS1, Studio Museum, the Bronx Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Palais de Tokyo, MASS MoCA, The Kitchen, and the ICA Philadelphia, among others.
exhibitions
Rasheed is the recipient of several honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), a Creative Capital Award (2022), Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2022), Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google (2022), Artes Mundi 11 Nominee (2024), High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree (2024), VIA Art Production Grant (2025). She has participated in residencies at UCross (2025), Triangle Arts (2018), Pioneer Works (2018), Denniston Hill (2017), Smack Mellon (2016), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2016), Lower East Side Printshop (2015), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2015), Center for Photography at Woodstock (2012), among others.
grants, awards, residencies
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.
publishing
Rasheed has over 25 years of experience in teaching, facilitation, and curriculum design. 

Having taught at Barnard College, Cooper Union, and the School for Visual Arts, among others, she currently serves as a critic at Yale University’s School of Art and the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at the California Institute of the Arts (2025-2027). Occasionally, she teaches courses in creative coding, pedagogy, and generative writing at the School for Poetic Computation. Since 2022, Rasheed has co-taught a writing and publishing intensive with Chang Yuchen for Bennington College's (formerly 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 was a visiting faculty member at the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art.
post-secondary teaching and curriculum
She has delivered invited lectures at Yale University, Princeton University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Rutgers University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Rice University, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Maryland, and Northwestern University, among others.

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, co-hosted by the Getty Foundation and the 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.
public speaking
Alongside her work within existing institutions, she experiments with institutional design and community building through the numerous projects she stewards at 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 $11,000 in unrestricted microgrants for artists on the cusp of new ideas.
projects and platforms
In 2016, with the support of the Magnum Foundation, she founded Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive that explores Black spiritual practices 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.
archival interventions
Nurtured by a large, expressive family, she had her parents and many brothers as her first and enduring guides, who encouraged her to pursue all her intellectual interests. Rasheed also cites her middle school teachers —three Black educators, Mr. Barksdale, Ms. Vest, and Ms. Shootes — as anchors in her learning journey.
learning anchors
Rasheed earned a B.A. in the self-designed Public Policy program with a focus on Africa/African Diaspora from Pomona College. Graduating at 20, she was also a 2005 Harry S Truman Scholar, a 2005 Rockefeller Brothers Fund Teaching Fellow, and a 2006 Amy Biehl Fulbright Scholar to Johannesburg, South Africa. Later, she earned her M.A. in Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University in 2008.
educational background
Prior to teaching in post-secondary settings, Rasheed spent fifteen years in secondary teaching and curriculum design. Her final year of teaching was at a transfer high school for overaged and undercredited students in New York City. The exceptional students she met during her five years of instruction taught her to see and feel more deeply.
secondary teaching and curriculum
In her free time, Rasheed regularly enjoys Japanese logic games (Sudoku, Kakuro, and Masyu), following the latest research on human and non-human perception, and dancing. Less frequently 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.
hobbies