Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (born 1985) is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed’s art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine and is also a contributing editor for The New Inquiry. 2Background 3Early life Born in East Palo Alto, California to Sunni Muslim parents, Rasheed characterizes herself as "a Muslim kid enrolled at a Catholic school and attended Mormon school dances, who went to shabbat dinners and attended Sunday church services with friends." When Rasheed was twelve years old, her family was unlawfully evicted from their home due to the sharp increase of land value in northern California near East Palo Alto, and entered a period of homelessness that lasted for the next ten years. The experience of moving through temporary homes with her family led to an interest in the practice of collecting and archiving to cope with her forced displacement. Rasheed attended Pomona College for her undergraduate degree, studying public policy and Africana. She traces her interest in visual art to class on black aesthetics and the politics of representation taken in her penultimate semester at Pomona. She was awarded an Amy Biehl Fulbright Scholarship to study in South Africa. Returning to the U.S., she completed a graduate degree in secondary education from Stanford Universit