Tiona Nekkia McClodden: The Trace of an Implied Presence

Visual artist, filmmaker, and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Her recent work explores re-memory and narrative biomythography. Her works have shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the MoMA, among many others. She is the recipient of the 2021-2023 Princeton Arts Fellowship, a Bucksbaum Award for her work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2019), among others. Tiona is based in North Philadelphia and is the Founder + Director of Conceptual Fade, a micro-gallery and library space centering Black thought + artistic production.

Ayanna Dozier (PhD) is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer. Her art practice centers performance, experimental film, printmaking and photography, using auto-fiction, surrealist, conceptual, and feminist methods. Her research on film navigates the history of distribution, archaeology, and radical work of Black feminist experimental filmmakers. While her current research and artwork is dedicated to examining how transactional intimacy (like sex work) redistributes care from the private sector into the public, social politics of relations. She is currently an assistant professor in communication, emphasis in film, at University Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020).