Miatta Kawinzi

2019 BEMIS ALUMNI AWARD WINNER

Miatta Kawinzi is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and educator. Born in Nashville, TN to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father, Kawinzi grew up moving through various geographic, cultural, and linguistic spaces that inform their work and interest in hybridity and layered imagery and content. The artist works with still and moving images, their voice and body, gesture, language, objects, space, and sound to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Their work engages interior and exterior landscapes to illuminate themes of selfhood, diaspora, and belonging.