Zoë Pulley

Zoë Pulley (born July 1993 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist, designer, and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses textiles, typography, writing, digital media, sound, installation, photography, publishing, and found materials to recover and amplify the seemingly ordinary stories of Black American life. Pulley describes the physical and nonphysical artifacts that accumulate within families—photographs, garments, books, jewelry, memories, ephemera, and domestic objects—as “stuff.” Rather than treating these materials as incidental, she approaches them as carriers of history through which family narratives, cultural memory, and Black everyday experience can be preserved and reinterpreted.  Family archives are particularly central to Pulley’s work. Her projects often begin with photographs, clothing, conversations, and objects passed through her maternal and paternal families, allowing her to explore how personal histories intersect with larger histories of Black migration and American life. In From D.C. to PG County in 1971, developed during her Studio Museum in Harlem residency, Pulley traces her family’s movement through Washington, D.C., and Prince George’s County, Maryland, translating archival photographs and remembered garments into textiles, photographic portraits, audio, and installation. Her interest in the movement of Black families also extends to histories of the Great Migration and the ways ordinary domestic archives can complicate official historical narratives.  Pulley earned a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 and an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2023. She was a 2023–24 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a 2025–26 Smack Mellon Studio Artist, and began a yearlong residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn in July 2026. Her work has been presented at MoMA PS1, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, Newport Art Museum, RISD Museum, and the Art Museum of the University of Memphis. Her work is held by the Studio Museum in Harlem as well as institutional library and archive collections including Harvard Radcliffe Institute and The Met’s Watson Library. Pulley lives and works in Brooklyn and teaches at Yale School of Art and Parsons School of Design.