Ayanna Dozier
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Ayanna Dozier
  • Home
  • Portfolio
    • Film
    • Photography
      • 6x12
      • 6x17
      • Polaroids
        • Glamour Girls
        • Rituals
      • 6x6 Square
      • 2:3 Ratio
        • Soft Waves
        • More 2:3 Ratio
    • Performance
    • Installations
  • Words
  • Bio
  • CV
  • News
  • Contact
© Ayanna Dozier
Website by OtherPeoplesPixels
  • Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope

    Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope

    2020

    This book examines Janet's continuation of her quest for control as heard in her sixth album, The Velvet Rope. Engaging with the album, the promotion, the tour, and its accompanying music videos, this study unpacks how Janet uses Black cultural production as an emancipatory act of self-creation that allows her to reconcile with and, potentially, heal from trauma, pain, and feelings of alienation. The Velvet Rope's arc moves audiences to imagine the possibility of what emancipation from oppression--from sexual, to internal, to societal--could look like for the singer and for others. The sexually charged content and themes of abuse, including self-harm and domestic violence, were dismissed as “selling points” for Janet at the time of its release. The album stands out as a revelatory expression of emotional vulnerability by the singer, one that many other artists have followed in the 20-plus years since its release.

  • Rebellious Inventions: Abstraction in the Black Diaspora

    Rebellious Inventions: Abstraction in the Black Diaspora

    2020

    This book by Dr. Ayanna Dozier accompanies the exhibition Abstraction in the Black Diaspora co-curated by Dozier and Tariku Shiferaw at FALSE FLAG, on view from October 24 until December 20, 2020.

    The essay by Dr. Dozier centers artistic praxis to emphasize technique and embodiment as equally important aspects of art-making. This focus on praxis frames Black abstraction as an aesthetics of doing, rather than an aesthetics of representational meaning, restoring affirmative ontological, creative thought and action to abstraction’s relationship with Blackness in an era defined by anti-Black racism.

    The book features illustrations of works by Adebunmi Gbadebo, Alteronce Gumby, Ashanté Kindle, and Tariku Shiferaw.

  • Screen Slate Articles

    Screen Slate Articles

    2020-present

    Landing page for articles and reviews on film published on Screen Slate

    Most recent piece is on Queen of the Damned

  • Pathe-ways in Time, Bodies, and Aesthetics: Onyeka Igwe's Specialised Technique

    Pathe-ways in Time, Bodies, and Aesthetics: Onyeka Igwe's Specialised Technique

    2020

    NON-FICTION 02 - NETWORK, piece is available to read in the second issue of Non-Fiction, available for purchase via the link and can be read online in issue 2 of Field Notes

  • Begone With the Wind: How Hollywood Rewrites Slavery

    2020

    This article published in Fantasy
    Issue #87 Bitch Magazine, Summer

    "Since their creation, narrative films have been altering the imaginary landscape of our past, our current lives, the future, and what we even imagine as possible. Consciously or not, cinema largely shapes our perception of historical events, so even our understanding of slavery is influenced directly by a filmmaker’s fantasy …"

  • Sound Garden

    2020

    Feature for Artforum, February 3rd: Ayanna Dozier on Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document (2019)

    "THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT IS A NOISY FILM, full of music, yelling, screaming, crying, scratching, wailing, and laughter. But the most deafening moments unfold in silence, when viewers are left to assess what is missing, what cannot be represented …"

  • Betye Saar Conjures a New Mythology at MoMA

    2019

    Review for The Art Newspaper, December 18th: The artist’s prints and assemblage works use symbolism to ascribe meaning to Black women’s place in the world

    "A Black face pressed against the window peers out; her gaze through glued-on recycled eyes confronts and troubles us. Above the silhouette of her head with tight curls is a series of vignettes laid out behind the window frame: a lion eating the sun, a brown head and brain riddled with symbols in colour-coded blocking, a daguerreotype, and in the center a pair of skeletons, one white and one black. Betye Saar uses such symbolism in her work, Black Girl’s Window (1969)…"

  • #Crucial21DbW: Mahogany Too Directed By Akosua Adoma Owusu

    2019

    Mahogany Too (2018) by Akosua Adoma Owusu is an experimental “sequel” to the 1975 Berry Gordy film, Mahogany.

  • The Music Video’s Counter-Poetics of Rhythm: Black Cultural Production in Lemonade

    The Music Video’s Counter-Poetics of Rhythm: Black Cultural Production in Lemonade

    2019

    Chapter 20 in The Routledge Companion to Global Television edited by Shawn Shimpach

    PDF available here

  • Heartbreak/Who Gets to Be Remembered: Black Women in and Around the Archives

    2019

    Feature examining heartbreak as a methodological practice in archives on Black women

  • Wayward Travels: Racial Uplift, Black Women, and the Pursuit of Love and Travel in Torchy in Heartbeats by Jackie Ormes

    Wayward Travels: Racial Uplift, Black Women, and the Pursuit of Love and Travel in Torchy in Heartbeats by Jackie Ormes

    2018

    Peer-reviewed academic article for Feminist Media Histories Journal

    PDF available here

  • Fucking Whiteness: Orientations, Desire, and Race in Camille Billops's Docu-Fantasy The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks

    Fucking Whiteness: Orientations, Desire, and Race in Camille Billops's Docu-Fantasy The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks

    2018

    PDF available here

  • No happy Returns, Aesthetics, Labor, and Affect in Julie Dash's Experimental Short Film Four Women (1975)

    No happy Returns, Aesthetics, Labor, and Affect in Julie Dash's Experimental Short Film Four Women (1975)

    2017

    Screengrab from Julie Dash's Four Women (1975)
    Peer-reviewed academic article for Feminist Media Studies Journal

    PDF available here

  • Structures de sentiment: La mélancolie, le mouvement, et l'espace publique

    2017

    Feature on colonial melancholy as expressed in social spaces like the movie theater (French)

    Un article sur la mélancolie coloniale et l’affect dans le théâtre dans Montréal

  • Black Women and the Edit of Shame

    Black Women and the Edit of Shame

    2017

    Analysis of Alile Sharon Larkin's experimental short film The Kitchen (1975) for cléo journal, available for purchase in The cléo Reader (2019)

  • Affect and the Fluidity of the Black Gendered Body in Water Ritual #1 and Cycles

    2015

    Essay on Barbara McCullough's Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) and Zeinabu irene Davis's Cycles (1989) featured in the fifth issue of Liquid Blackness: Passing Through Film

  • There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed

    2015

    Performa review for Juliana Huxtable's There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed performance at Performa 15

© Ayanna Dozier
Website by OtherPeoplesPixels