Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a

from East Palo Alto, CA

I am a learner and death doula in (perpetual) training.

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

Accordingly, I explore gestures of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual language. I am curious about the politics of noise, “dirty data,” ¹and intelligibility.

I examine the materiality of wayward language - acrobatic sentences² (Clarice Lispector); anarchic stanzas with no recognized monarch³ (Emily Dickinson); phrases with trapdoors or underground railroads⁴ (Fred Moten); runaway syllables that scatter to the marooned edges of a page; words that escape the orbit of their mother sentence; footnotes that consume their reference; and ecstatic outbursts that dissipate before being recorded.

Likewise, I consider errant⁵ “reading” and perception practices – the consumption and metabolization of the written word; a reader’s antenna that picks just as much noise as signal; and ergodic⁶ approaches.

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