Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of African-American, Filipino, & Chinese descents. Campbell’s practice is an excavation of public secrets using live performance, installation, sound, painting, film/video, and texts. Campbell engages with material, archival, and sonic traces of the witness–recent works revisit Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cell line, perform minute and monumental gestures in a coastal Swedish landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a now demolished Black Civil Rights theater (The Slave Theater) in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Campbell is currently working on a film around the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre entitled: SLICK.

Campbell exhibits and screens internationally: The Drawing Center (US), Nest (Netherlands), ICA-Philadelphia (US), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Project Row Houses (US), Visual Studies Workshop (US), and SculptureCenter (US), amongst others. Select honors and awards include: Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell Colony, M-AAA, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, VCCA Alonzo Davis Fellowship, Flaherty Film Seminar Fellowship, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Campbell is a forthcoming Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021).

Photo credit: Jeremy Charles