Ayana V. Jackson

Ayana V. Jackson (b. 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey; lives and works between Brooklyn, NY, and Johannesburg, South Africa) uses archival impulses to examine the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography. By employing her lens to deconstruct 19th- and early 20th-century portraiture, Jackson interrogates photography’s claims to authenticity and its role in perpetuating socially constructed and hierarchical identities.

Jackson’s practice maps the ethical relationships between photographer, subject, and viewer, exploring themes of race, gender, and reproduction. Her work examines the myths of the Black diaspora and re-stages colonial archival imagery as a means to liberate the Black body. The titles of her series reference the narratives she reimagines, and Jackson frequently casts herself in the role of historical figures in order to guide their stories and directly access photography’s impact on the human body.

Her work is held in major local and international collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey; the J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle.

Jackson was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography (2014) and the recipient of a Smithsonian Fellowship in 2018. In 2021, she founded STILL Art, an artist residency programme in Johannesburg supporting emerging contemporary artists from Southern Africa. Her first major institutional exhibition, “From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya,” opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in April 2023. Two years later, her first major European exhibition opened in April 2025 at the Museo de Antropología in Madrid.