Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and death doula in training based in Brooklyn, NY.

(︎Selected Course Descriptions)

Please email studio@kameelahr.com for a syllabus.

Tangents, Noise, and Side Quests: The Artist as Feral Researcher

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Research is a crucial component of the art-making process. Beyond its expected role as simply preparation for creating art, we will consider varied forms of research as an integrated, iterative, and sometimes inconspicuous pursuit woven throughout all stages of the artist’s process. This course will serve as an incubator for ongoing research interests. Guided through a series of prompts, discussions, and experiments, we will interrogate not only what holds our attention but also why, what is at stake, and what counts as “useful” or “relevant” in this inquiry. Together, we will explore more conventional research methodologies alongside speculative, absurdist, and collaborative approaches. Core texts include the expanded second edition of Reclaiming Artistic Research (2024), edited by Lucy Cotter, Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts (2008), Adrian Piper’s Why I’m Not Talking About My Artwork (2015), Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947), and James Elkins' How to Use Your Eyes (2000). The course will culminate in three interrelated outcomes: (1) three research inquiry questions and a description of the problem spaces from which these questions emerge; (2) a description of a personal research methodology that situates and expands the student’s research approach within their art practice; (3) a research “artifact” presented in any form.


The Word is the Fourth Dimension

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The course title comes from the 2012 English translation of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (1973). This course invites us to create work that engages with written, spoken, and embodied language, and to explore the artists who push us to consider new relationships with language. Beyond the page, we explore language practices across various substrates and environments: the browser, the wall, the body, the sky, and the land. We will explore the work of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, JJJJJerome, Susan Howe, Pope. L, sadé powell, Renee Gladman, M. NourbeSe Philip, N.H. Pritchard, Chang Yuchen, Ken Cox, Bethany Collins, Steffani Jemison, Jenny Holzer, bp Nichol, Allison Parrish, Eduardo Kac, Tony Cokes, Adrian Piper, Herdimas Anggara, and many more. Classes will include opportunities for play, discussions, lectures, and making. Our weekly reading assignments are accompanied by student-designed discussion questions. In the background of the course, we will slowly read Lispector’s Água Viva as a haunt in our study of those who attempt to wrangle language.


Teaching as Social Practice

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This course invites students to actively explore the evolving role of the artist engaged in teaching as an art practice. While the undergraduate who is currently teaching or who has an interest in teaching in The Saturday Program was the original audience for this class, this class is also for anyone interested in unpacking their own schooling experiences and exploring the role of play in learning. Teaching as Social Practice is a part studio and part seminar class about poetics, politics, and the pleasures of teaching and learning. Through hands-on projects, mini-lectures, discussions, field trips, and demos, we will develop works that culminate in a showcase of playful interventions, scores, and games. Over our fifteen weeks together, we will design various lessons and learning experiences that center on play and collaboration. We will focus on questions of trust, care, and intuition in the teaching and learning process. More than anything, we will explore teaching and learning as a relational art, or what Octavia Estelle Butler calls “primitive hypertext.” We will consider how the lessons we write and facilitate actively build relationships between people, places, ideas, materials, time, etc.