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KJR Studios

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a
from East Palo Alto, CA





© Kameelah Janan Rasheed. All rights reserved.










[1]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2021)
I mean learning as a process of radical slowing down/deceleration in the context of almost compulsory acceleration under the current conditions; an attentiveness to a velocity that allows for a patient and close reading; an engagement with curiosity, serendipity, improvisation, and tangents. Learning is a persistent reminder of the shifting ecologies of what it means to know something.

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[2]: International End of Life Doula Association. “What Is an End-of-Life Doula?” last modified 2023? (accessed November 15, 2025). https://inelda.org/about-doulas/what-is-a-doula/


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[3a]: “Semitic Root,” Wikipedia, last modified November 14, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root


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[3b]: “Project Root List,” StudyQuran, accessed November 16, 2025, https://studyquran.org/PRL/PRLonline.htm


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[3c]: Wehr, Hans. A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: Arabic-English. 4th rev. ed. Edited by J. Milton Cowan. Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services, Inc., 1976.


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[4a]: Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. United States: New Directions, 2012.

[4b]: Acheampong, Michelle, “Kameelah Janan Rasheed on Learning and Unlearning,” Art in America, July 1, 2021.

[4c]: Syllables of Velvet” and “Sentences of Plush” in Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s 1862 letter to Eudocia C. Flynt.


[4d]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2023)
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[5a]:  Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. United States: W. W. Norton, 2019.; Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s Letters (The Atlantic, 1862, L271 and L265)



[5b]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2023; 2021)

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[6]: Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. United States: New Directions, 2012.

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[7]: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s Letters (The Atlantic, 1862, L271 and L265)


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[8]: Renee Gladman and Fred Moten: One Long Black Sentence. United States: Image Text Ithaca, 2020.

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[9]: Imamura, “Escape Velocity,” last modified (n.d.), University of Oregon, accessed November 15, 2025, https://pages.uoregon.edu/imamura/121/lecture-4/escape.html

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[10]: Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997

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[11]: Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

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[12]: Steyerl, Hito. “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition.” e-flux Journal no. 72 (April 2016). Accessed November 14, 2025. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60480/a-sea-of-data-apophenia-and-pattern-mis-recognition
 Work Statement 












I am a learner [1]  and a death doula [2] in (perpetual) training.

My middle name, Janan, comes from the Arabic trilateral root [3a] (J-N-N / جنان) [3b][3c], evoking that which is unmoored, veiled, and wayward.

Accordingly, I explore gestures of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual language.

I examine the materiality[4a] [4b] [4c] [4d] of wayward [5a] [5b]  language: acrobatic sentences [6] (Clarice Lispector); anarchic stanzas with no recognized monarch [7]  (Emily Dickinson);
phrases with trapdoors or underground railroads [8] (Fred Moten); runaway syllables that scatter to the marooned edges of a page; words that escape the orbit [9] of their mother sentence; footnotes that consume their reference; and ecstatic outbursts that dissipate before being recorded.

Likewise, I consider errant [10] “reading” and perception practices – the consumption and metabolization of the written word; a reader’s antenna that picks up just as much noise as signal; and surrendering to ergodic [11] texts. I am curious about the politics of noise, “dirty data,” [12] and intelligibility.

A “language person” (Paul Soulellis), I “give language a body” (Chang Yuchen) through large-scale installations, multichannel video works, publications, learning platforms, software, performance, public archives,  and other forms yet to be determined.