Doing Biography

WORK 01

Writing Whiteness

A Biographical Essay on Keliy Anderson-Staley

In 2022, I conducted a series of interviews with award-winning photographer and University of Houston art professor Keliy Anderson-Staley about her life story. Her recent work deals with family archives as traces of a life, a complex family narrative, and the workings of whiteness in the life of an artist who spent many years searching for her birth father.

With a Faculty Innovation Fund grant from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and additional support from the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET), which hosted the exhibition, Keliy commissioned me to write a biographical essay for the catalog Documents & Dwellings. My essay was included alongside images of her works included in the summer 2023 exhibition.

Keliy and I were joined in conversation by Tarrah Krajnak, to discuss Archives, Biography and Visual Culture at University of Houston on April 14, 2022. See a recording of the panel here.

WORK 02

La Reina de Fusión

The Importance of
Xiomara Fortuna

I interviewed Xiomara Fortuna for the documentary film Cimarron Spirit (2015) to highlight her work and from that interview, and wrote a brief biographical essay about the vast knowledge she offers us as an AfroDominican artist. When I had the opportunity to publish about Xiomara a second time and continue the conversation–for a requested piece of writing I would transform for readers of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, I jumped at the opportunity.

I am inspired by Xiomara’s dedication to making music, social justice and environmentalism. Interviewing her I was especially curious about her journey as an internationally recognized artist and feminist, who had ultimately decided to pursue a life and career based on the island. I found that by delving into Xiomara’s life story, I could see how her experiences of race and racism, growing up in Monte Cristi as a Afro-Dominican youth with a white mother has made her who she is today.

My two essays on Xiomara Fortuna:
“‘No tienes que entenderlo, solo respetalo’: Xiomara Fortuna, Racism, Feminism and Other Forces in the Dominican Republic” in The Black Scholar (Vol. 45, No. 3), 2015.
“La Reina de la Fusión: Xiomara Fortuna Coming of Age in the Dominican Republic” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Volume 21, Number 1, 2022.