Crystal Z Campbell

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets— fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks’s “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Sonic, material, and archival traces of the witness inform their work in film, performance, installation, sound, painting, and texts.

Honors and awards include the Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, MAAA, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and Flaherty Film Seminar. Exhibitions include the Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, REDCAT, Artissima, Studio Museum of Harlem, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, and San Francisco Museum of Art, amongst others. Campbell’s writing has been featured in World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic.

Campbell is a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021) and founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, Campbell lives and works in Oklahoma.

Photo Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh