April 24th – May 31st

Microscope is very pleased to present “Get on Your Knees, Jesus Loves You,” the second solo exhibition at the gallery by New York-based artist Ayanna Dozier, opening April 24th (6-8PM).

The new photographs — which have been hand-printed by the artist onto various leathers — and 16mm film and film installations in the show often find the artist performing for the camera, and are primarily motivated by Dozier’s personal experience in a Christian fundamentalist church, which she belonged to as a teenager.

Dozier’s focuses on the repressive church hierarchies — where God and by proxy the pastor/father/husband/man are typically given respect and power not afforded to others — to address themes of submission, autonomy, and self-care. Additionally, the artist draws parallels between religious and BDSM practices, seeking to make visible “the psychosexual implications and rhetoric present in the Bible and within evangelical spaces.”

Image: Incurvatus in se, 2024, leather, 20x16 inches

May 8th 7PM

Brooklyn-based artist-writer Ayanna Dozier’s often utilizes experimental film to examine how transactional intimacy, such as sex work, redistributes care from the private sector into the public. In the lead up to a screening and conversation of the premiere of Dozier's %Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water" at the Walker, Dozier sat down with Zia Anger (My First Film) to discuss pain, pleasure, and filmmaking.

Image: still Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water, 2025, Super 16mm, 25 min, color and black and white

April 6th

Bounded Intimacy received one of the film festival Juror Honorable Mention awards at this year's Onion City Experimental Film Festival in Chicago.

"As the edit unfolds, the movement from wide angle to intimate closeups subverts the safety of the voyeur’s gaze to a perplexing, at times even humorous effect. The rhythm of the lead performer’s ambulations in the frame feels bracing when it first appears, a kinetic whirl of saturated spots cutting through a bird’s eye view of the Manhattan cityscape."

– Drew Durepos

Image: still Bounded Intimacy, 2024, Super 8, 6 min, color

March 30th 2:15-5PM

Filmmakers in Focus explores the corpus of works by filmmakers who have maintained a responsive and reflective relationship to the moment in which they are working. Drawing on underrepresented experiences, vital histories and moments that are in need of remembrance, these filmmakers offer a remarkable and enduring lens to our world. The 20th Edition welcomes programmes in celebration of the works of Ayanna Dozier and Eri Makihara.

Image: still from Nightwalker, 7 mins, 2022, S8 on 16mm film

January 18th-February 22nd

Opening next Saturday, January 18th from 5-7pm @ 53 Orchard — ‘Ramp’s Edge’ curated by Marissa Graziano featuring work by Ayanna Dozier, Won Ju Lim, Irini Miga, and Josh Rondeau

Partially nestled within a Chinese kitchen supply store, the exhibition considers our relationships to space through a survey of paranoia and surveillance that continually asks, “do you know what to do?”

Image: still from Nightwalker, 7 mins, 2022, S8 on 16mm film

January 15th 6-8PM

Get to know 2024 Workspace A-I-R Ayanna Dozier and the projects she’s been working on during her residency.

+ Join us for Open Studio tomorrow, January 15th, from 6—8pm, where Dozier will be sharing several recent and ongoing film and film photography projects exploring intimacy in personal relationships, labor, and archives.

This event is free to the public and will be held in our Highlight Studios. No RSVP is required. ⁠

The Penumbra Workspace Program is supported by Henry Nias Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, and The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

36 E. 30th St., NY
Image: Alive With Pleasure, photobook (2025)

Bounded Intimacy is screening online as part of Media City Film Festival's 2024 Virtual Edition until December 30th.

Bounded Intimacy (part of the artist’s trilogy of Super 8mm shorts entitled “It’s Just Business, Baby”) examines the histories of various forms of body labour across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts that were renowned as sites for sex work, sex clubs, and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is “authentic;” the nature of their relationship is irrelevant, as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire of the encounter between the two.

September 26th-October 12th

It's Just Business, Baby (2023) will play in program 2 of CROSSROADS 2024 Online Echo from September 26th through October 12th for free.

The CROSSROADS 2024 online echo presents deep cuts and festival favorites remixed and distilled from the far-reaching 75-film festival into two concise programs, streaming to homes and phones around the world. Online program 2—the haunted sprawl—wefts luminous explorations of the haunted metropolis with expressions of familial distance, memory and intimacy in the face of the increasingly virtual before reaching a stirring and elegiac conclusion.

SCREENING:
to open a window (2023) by Craig Scheihing (US); 16mm, color, silent, 2 minutes.
Feather Family (2023) by Alison Folland (US); digital video, black & white, sound, 5 minutes.
Hey Sweet Pea (2023) by Alee Peoples (US); 16mm, color, sound, 11 minutes.
The San Francisco Art Institute (A Ghost Story) (2024) by Dominic Angerame (US); digital video, b&w, sound, 9 minutes.
Foot to Ground (2024) by Christopher Thompson (US); digital video, black & white, sound, 9 minutes.
It’s Just Business, Baby (2023) by Ayanna Dozier (US); digital video, color, silent, 6 minutes.
why i never became a driver (2023) by Yuula Benivolski (Canada); digital video, color, sound, 12 minutes.
Ripple Effect (2024) by Niyaz Saghari (UK); digital video, black & white, sound, 9 minutes.
TRT: 62 minutes

October 4th-April 25th

Forever Your Girl is included in the "American Gurl" exhibition, co-curated by Zehra Ahmed and Kilo Kish, at the Harvey B. Gantt Center in North Carolina.

American Gurl is an ongoing curatorial project featuring work that explores all shades of American dreaming. This installment of the project will take shape as a film exhibition at Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture that will present eight films by intergenerational artists with curiosity around the perspectives and nuances within the Black feminine experience and our relationships with beauty, success, freedom, and power in America. American Gurl is presented in collaboration with Womxn in Windows, a platform whose mission is to share the perspectives of women of color through video, art, film, and performance.

August 31st 3:30 PM (PST)

Two films from the "It's Just Business, Baby" trilogy of shorts will screen at the forthcoming edition of CROSSROADS in San Francisco. Bounded Intimacy (2024) and It's Just Business, Baby (2023) will have its world and Bay area premieres respectively in the fourth program: obscured by clouds on August 31st at 3:30 PM at the Gray Area Grand Theater.

2665 Mission Street

July 26th-August 13th

Screening part of VERBATIM before FIRES IN THE MIRROR.

This film series focuses on a very particular technique that filmmakers and screenwriters have adopted on rare but almost inevitably indelible occasions: drawing the dialogue or onscreen text verbatim from various written documentary materials – transcripts of interviews, cockpit voice recorders, public hearings, or (most often) trials. By incorporating these preexisting, documentary transcripts into fictionalized or re-staged contexts.

Image: Vincent Gallo's Sperm, 2022

July 24th 7PM (EST)

Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above (2022) will screen as part of Alfreda's Cinema program Heartbreak Church, an evening of screenings and talks inspired by bell hooks. The evening will conclude with a talk with Dr. Raquel Gates and Melissa Lyde.

Brooklyn Arts Music, Rose Cinemas

July 20th 7PM (PST)

Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues is a film series curated and organized by Amy Reid and Kathleen Quillian with the help of an international advisory board. The series is dedicated to exploring the visions, voices, concerns and lineage of women, non-binary, genderqueer and trans filmmakers through public film screenings, workshops, conversations and presentations.

Program 2: Self as Social Construct includes: Softer by Ayanna Dozier, Reinventing the Wheel by Elena Knox, Free, White and 21 by Howardena Pindell, Forward Fast by Lorraine Sovern, Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re) Educational Videotape by Valerie Soe, Venus in Ferns by Laura Conway, Fragile by Sasha Waters, Matchbox by Jennifer Cabral, Mirror, Mirror by Jan Krawitz, Flower Eater by Heather Brown, Beauties by Lisa Marr and Women by Connie Beeson.

Shapeshifters Cinema, 567 5th St., Oakland, CA

Image: Softer still, 2020

June 8th-June 30th

All Street Gallery (New York, NY) is pleased to present Autonomy – a group exhibition of artworks by Ayanna Dozier, Christl Stringer, Emma Kanne, K Sarrantonio, Lydia Nobles, and Thank God for Abortion. On view from June 8 - 30, 2024, the show explores the intersection of bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and queer rights. Through a diverse range of mediums and perspectives, the featured artists confront and challenge conventional narratives surrounding sexuality, gender, and reproductive rights, advocating for a more expansive and fluid approach to agency and choice.

Image: I Took Your Fuck Personally (2022)

PENUMBRA FOUNDATION IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE 2024 WORKSPACE PROGRAM ARTISTS:

New York City-Based Artists:

Ayanna Dozier
Cheryl Mukherji
Jeanette Spicer
US-Based Artists:

Cali Banks
Ryan Frigillana
Aaron Turner

Image: Ayanna Dozier, génuflexions, 2024

May 29th 1PM (EST)

Convened as part of a series of conversations revisiting the Vera List Center’s 2022 publication ‘Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech’, this program will explore how the aberrant image unlocks a surveillance “sight-based” discourse, connects related histories of exploitation and resistance, and contends with questions of sovereignty, solidarity, and criminality. Examining artworks by Dozier and Jeffereis, the conversation will consider the archive’s relationship to surveillance, and how the aberrant image opens up speculative possibilities and discourse for evasion from institutional ownership.

May 9th 2:30PM-3:30PM

Film Comment Live: Writing About Experimental Film part of Wave 1: Program 2 of 2024 Prismatic Ground Festival with Devika Girish, Clinton Krute, Ayanna Dozier, Amy Taubin, Genevieve Yue at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, 87 Lafayette St., NY

May 20th 6PM-9PM

Sex Ed is a three-week intensive designed to create the sex education we never had, but always sought. Organized by SFPC Co-Directors Melanie Hoff and Neta Bomani, with the support of Assistant Teacher Bitter Kali, Sex Ed will cover topics such as the cybernetics of sex; queering consent; BDSM communication structures; polyamory 101; surveillance and sex work; denouement as desire, and more!
𓂃 ࣪˖
Located in-person @CreativeTime & @HexH0use
𓂃 ࣪˖ Surveillance and Racial Reproductive Control co-taught by Ayanna Dozier and Gabriella Garcia

Design by @xsainte

April 6th-June 1st

Honor Fraser is pleased to present "Erotic Codex," a group exhibition that surveys the liberatory affordances of sex, and the erotic devices that artists use to harness power in an evolving digital landscape. Featuring fifteen artists who embrace the body as a site for rupture, rapture, and reconciliation, the exhibition asks how emerging technologies reconfigure cultural norms around sex, just as they shape the political impact of sexuality at home and in public. In turn, Erotic Codex illuminates the entangled ways that we understand intimacy, artificiality, and our own bodies through the prolonged relationships we share with the technological objects at hand.

Co-curated by Alice Scope and Jamison Edgar at Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

April 26th-27th

Nightwalker (2022) will have its world premiere at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival on Friday, April 26th. A Picture for Parco (2022) will also play at the festival on Saturday, April 27th.

Both screenings will take place at Company Brewing, 735 E Center Street, Milwaukee, WI.

still from Nightwalker | 2022 | Super 8 color on 16mm print | 7 mins

August 30th-October 11th

PLATFORM centre and WNDX festival of moving image are thrilled to co-present the first Canadian solo exhibition of works by Ayanna Dozier curated by Sarah-Tai Black.

Touch Me On The Inside And Call Me By My Name brings together new and recent film, text, and installation work that builds on Dozier’s practice of locating the body as an oft-contested site of pleasure, labour, and care. Largely utilizing tactile, analog processes, Dozier offers the personal, the intimate, and the embodied as public record. Here, the body is an index of the ways in which white supremacy has precluded collective care from intimacy, engaging with the body and self as a means of governance, dispossession, and surveillance. Drawing its name from Dozier’s citational titling of her photographic work, the works in this show render power and intimacy as a complex entanglement that affects a multiplicity of experience over time and space.

Installation Image by Daisy Wu, 2023

As part of Prismatic Ground festival selections, Maman Brigitte is available to stream on The Criterion Channel through 2027.

Maman Brigitte stitches together the intimacy of a private ritual involving the Voodoo Ioa Maman Brigitte with the sound of the body (spitting, running, vomiting, etc.). These "interior" corporeal practices are juxtaposed against sweeping landscapes to draw out film/ritual's capacity to make the hidden manifest.

still from Maman Brigitte | 2021 | Super 8 color and b&w | 3 mins

June 27

A Panel Discussion on The Gaze in Sex Worker Art

We invite you to join Veil Machine for our panel, Trick Mirror: Through the Whore’s Looking Glass, featuring Natasha Gornik, Ayanna Dozier, Gabriella Garcia, and Monika Rostvold.

June 24th-July 30th

Womxn in Windows presents "American Gurl," an ongoing curatorial project that showcases video art, film, and performance to unpack and re-envision the American Dream through the lens of women. Co-curated by Zehra Zehra and Kilo Kish, this iteration of the American Gurl project takes its shape as a group film exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles.

The films are exhibited in the following order on a loop:

Kilo Kish, Death Fantasy, 2:10 min
Lorna Simpson, The Institute, 5:13 min
Savanah Leaf, run, 9:06 min
LaJuné McMillianin collaboration with Marguerite Hemmings, Antidote, 21:38 min
Carrie Mae Weems, Afro-Chic, 5:00 min
Ayanna Dozier, Forever Your Girl, 7:35 min
Ja’Tovia Gary, Quiet As It’s Kept, 26:00 min
Martine Syms, Meditation, 4:19 min

Via Microscope Gallery news: Nightwalker (2022) has been acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its Permanent Collection.

“To be a woman who walks alone at night then is an anomaly for women who walk at night are systemically associated with sex work by state and city laws. These ‘nightwalker’ codes disproportionately target Black femmes or women who ‘make a display’ by wearing clothing that can be deemed risqué by an arresting officer. In Nightwalker (2022), I play with the ambiguity of a stylish woman walking the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. By having the camera follow my body, I aim to draw attention to how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. The film is ambivalent as to whether or not the character is a sex worker and is more interested in the violence, both institutional and personal, that shrouds women walking alone at night.” - Ayanna Dozier

still from Nightwalker | 2022 | Super 8 color on 16mm print | 7 mins