Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and a death doula in training. Her middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic trilateral root (J-N-N / جنان) evoking that which is unmoored, veiled, and wayward. Accordingly, she explores the politics and poetics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual language.  A "language person" (Paul Soulellis), she "gives language a body" (Chang Yuchen) through her large-scale installations, multichannel video works, publications, software, performance, public archives, and learning platforms. 

Her work across art and pedagogy have garnered numerous honors. In 2025, she was awarded a VIA Art Production for a commissioned film and installation as part of a group show at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In 2024, she was named an Artes Mundi 11 Finalist and received a High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree. She received additional fellowships and awards from Pioneer Works - Working Artist (2023); Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2022); Creative Capital Award (2022); an Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google (2022); and Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2021). Her work has also been presented worldwide, including North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum, the Bronx Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, MASS MoCA, the Kitchen, and ICA Philadelphia, among others. Having published half a dozen books as a second grader in East Palo Alto through her school's publishing center, Rasheed continues her love of publishing as the the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing imprint, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing imprint, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021).

She serves as a full-time critic at Yale University's School of Art. She is also the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at the California Institute of the Arts. Alongside her work within existing institutions, she experiments with institutional design and community building through the numerous projects she oversees at KJR Studios. She founded The Little Octopus School (est. 2024), a roaming learning laboratory and publishing imprint (Scratch Disks Full) rooted in play, curiosity, and collaboration. She is also the founder of Orange Tangent Study (est. 2020), a consultancy reimagining the design of learning experiences and dispersing over $11,000 in unrestricted microgrants for artists on the cusp of new ideas.  
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