Ayana V. Jackson

Ayana V. Jackson (born May 14, 1977, in New Jersey) is an African American photographer, filmmaker, performance-based image maker, and researcher whose practice interrogates the histories of photography, colonial representation, race, gender, and the African diaspora. Raised in East Orange, New Jersey, Jackson earned a BA in Sociology from Spelman College in 1999 and later studied critical theory and large-format printing at Universität der Künste Berlin. Working primarily through elaborately staged self-portraiture, she revisits nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographic conventions to examine how the camera has historically participated in constructing racialized and gendered identities. Jackson frequently places her own body at the center of the image, assuming the roles of historical, fictional, mythological, and speculative figures. By restaging archival photographs and visual conventions originally shaped by colonial ethnography, slavery, anthropology, and European portraiture, she disrupts the power relationship between photographer and photographed subject. Rather than allowing Black women to remain objects of an external gaze, Jackson becomes simultaneously author, performer, subject, and image-maker. Her practice asks who has historically been allowed to control representation and what new histories can emerge when Black subjects claim authorship over their own image. Jackson's recent work increasingly incorporates speculative history and mythology. Her landmark project From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya draws inspiration from Drexciya, the underwater civilization imagined by the Detroit electronic music duo of the same name as descendants of pregnant African women thrown or forced overboard during the Middle Passage. Working with designers and collaborators across Africa, Jackson created a visual world in which Black aquatic beings survive, evolve, and construct lives beyond the violence of slavery. Presented at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in 2023, the project marked both Jackson's first major monographic museum exhibition and her first substantial expansion into video and animation. In 2025, Jackson expanded her investigation of Black diasporic histories through Nosce Te Ipsum: Membrum Fantasma at Madrid's Museo Nacional de Antropología, examining African-descended women's presence within histories of Spain, Mexico, and the broader Spanish colonial world. In 2026, the Rencontres d'Arles presented her solo exhibition The Good News Is Delivered Not on Mountaintops but in Clearings, which shifted attention away from dominant narratives of conquest toward less visible histories of survival, persistence, and liberation. Jackson is also the founder of STILL Art, an artist residency established in Johannesburg in 2021 to support emerging artists from Southern Africa.