Elissa Blount Moorhead

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Elissa Blount Moorhead is an award-winning artist, curator, writer, and producer who has been creating, curating and organizing with artists and events for 30 years. In that time, she has co-produced and curated over 40 exhibitions and multimedia projects.

Elissa Blount Moorhead comes from and is fiercely interested in, black self-determination. In her 30-year-long career as artist, curator, writer, and producer of films and multimedia projects, she has been focusing on black communities, their histories, and the otherworldly possibilities of their creative achievements. In particular, Blount Moorhead is committed to collaborative creative processes that implement an anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist view of filmmaking, and are instead propelled by what she describes as a “feminine energy.” As a partner in the production company at TNEG film studio, founded by artists Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed, whose mission is to create a cinema “capable of matching the same power, beauty and alienation of black music” and as central to the cultural, social, and economical life of the 21st century as black music was to the 20th, her goal has been to capture the intensities of black lives, the rhythms of lineages of knowledge and self-determination as they are passed on and passed through, and, in this way, affect the very evolution of cinema.

In her own creative practice, Blount Moorhead focuses on “the poetics of quotidian Black life to emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community building.” (“About: Elissa Blount-Moorhead”). To describe a recent work, As of A Now—an x-ray film projection showing now vacant row houses in Baltimore full of the audiovisual stories of their former Black denizens, using oral histories and augmented reality (“As of a Now,” Creative Capital)—Blount Moorhead evoked Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice of anarchitecture as both as a way of upending the prescribed functionality of architectural structures and as a way to think of buildings as connective tissues, as capable of acting as repositories of lived histories that urban renewal makes otherwise disappear. liquid blackness takes this as a guiding concept to understand the artist’s own intervention within the “architecture of the image and of image-making.”

Before relocating from Brooklyn to Baltimore, where she currently lives, Blount Moorhead co-curated Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn (2014), a collaboration between Creative Time and the Weeksville Heritage Center, one of 19th century America’s first free black communities, featuring works by Xenobia Bailey, Simone Leigh, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and Bradford Young. In 2016 she co-curated Art in Odd Places: Race, an exploration of the “Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?” of race which took place along 14th St in Manhattan from Avenue C to the Hudson River. In 2017 she was one of one hundred female artists who formed a collective spearheaded by Simone Leigh to respond to, "the continued inhumane institutionalized violence against black lives” (“Closing Celebration for We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women,” Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter). Blount Moorhead is currently producing a documentary film on Gil Scott Heron and working on a screenplay with her sister.

Blount Moorhead contributed chapters in collections and catalogs, including her “Eight-Point Plan of Euphorically Utopic World-Making” in the anthology How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance, where she builds on the counterculture her parents created, insists on her centering on Blackness, in all its euphoric possibilities, emphasizing world-making as a key element in not only shaping the understanding of current existence but also in decentralizing the White Gaze. For The Radical Museum: Democracy, Dialog, & Debate, she articulates Weeksville Heritage Center’s history of self-determination in a chapter titled “Taken, not Granted,” which resists the white supremacist idea that freedom, land, rights, refuge, and self should be the outcome of white benevolence rather than black self-determination. She is also the author of P is for Pussy, an illustrated “children’s” book with illustrator Meltem Sahin.

At TNEG she has worked on APEX redacted, presented at FLUX NIGHT 2015: DREAM in Atlanta (2015), and was one of the key creative forces behind the video for Jay-Z’s title song 4:44, among many other works.

More recently Blount Moorhead completed Back and Song, a four-channel film installation, co-created with award-winning cinematographer and visual artist Bradford Young, which considers medical discrimination and healing in the Black community. Playing in 20-minute loops, the installation’s four screens incorporate contemporary and archival footage of dancing, childbirth, medicine men, prisoners, and testimonials about meditation. The installation, organized by the Philadelphia Contemporary and Thomas Jefferson University, recently concluded an October residency at the chapel of Girard College in Philadelphia.

Moorhead is the recipient of several awards, including the USA Artist Fellowship, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fellowship, Ford Foundation /Just Films/Rockwood Fellowship, Ruby Award, the 2019 Creative Capital Award for As of a Now and is a 2020 a fellow of the Sundance Institute.

In 2023, Blount Moorhead was awarded a fellowship with The Sundance Institute Episodic Program and became a resident of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Visual Arts, Literary Arts, Filmmaking.

*page complied with contributions from Corey Couch, Daren Fowler, and Alessandra Raengo