Courtney Desiree Morris

Photo by Diamela Cutiño

Center for Afrofuturist Studies artist-in-residence, May-June 2024

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/performance artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (2023, Rutgers University Press). Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Her work is primarily concerned with ancestral memory, ritual work, ecology, climate change, death, mourning and funerary practice, erotics, and black feminist aesthetics. She has shown work and performed at the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery (Oakland, CA), the Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA), the San Francisco LGBT Center, Root Division (San Francisco), the Frye Museum (Seattle, WA), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, Spain), the Jordan Schnitzer Museum (Eugene, OR), Fototeca de Havana (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Slash SF, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), JACK (Brooklyn, NY), the San Francisco Public Library, SOMArts (SF), and C3A -- Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (Córdoba, Spain), A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Performance Space New York, and the Berkeley Art Center. She is a national member of the A.I.R. Gallery and an alumna of The Austin Project. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA.