Fall 2021
In Fall 2021 zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o'neal served as the Cook Center's inaugural Engaged Artist-in-Residence. najeebah dumas o’neal is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, and independent curator. Her work is most often initiated by personal and social histories related to family legacy, queerness, community making, and interiority.
Her practice borrows from visual traditions such as social portraiture, video assemblage, and vernacular found family sourced materials. Currently, her body of work prioritizes social relationships related to queerness, Black women’s identity formation, family, social architectures and the desire for connectedness.
zakkiyyah is also a co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective driven project that prioritizes shared experiences and concerns by lens based artists of the Black diaspora.
