zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal is a Chicago-based visual artist, independent curator, and arts administrator.
zakkiyyah’s visual practice is anchored by a commitment to fostering a different kind of gaze that transcends the conventional and engages with empathy, desire, love, queer identity, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. Her work engages a more nuanced understanding of selfhood and Black femme existentialism to navigate the intricacies of belonging and aliveness across time, location, and space, engaging both the universal and the specific. Her current body of work is reflective of her ongoing quest to utilize deeply personal interventions to encourage ways of being and feeling that reach beyond the systems and conditions imposed upon us – to arrive closer to autonomy and oneness.
Her practice has been presented in various forms at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, NADA, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, DePaul University, EXPO Chicago, and Harvard Graduate School of Design, to name a few. She has curated exhibitions at the Chicago Art Department, Blanc Gallery, and the Washington Park Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago. She was a 2021 Artist in Residence at Arts and Public Life at University of Chicago, a 2021 Artist in Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, and a 2022 3Arts Gary & Denise Gardner Fund Awardee. She is currently an Albertine Foundation Awardee (2023-24). Her work is represented in both private and public collections, including the Block Museum at Northwestern University and Eskenazi Museum of Art.
zakkiyyah is also a Co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective of Black artists, thinkers, and curators that prioritize shared experiences and concerns by lens based artists of the Black diaspora. Learn more at zakkiyyahnajeebah.com.
Photo by Jordan Campbell
Bio as of 5/2024