Biography

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of African American, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets— fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks' “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Sonic, material, and archival traces of the witness informs their work in film, performance, installation, sound, painting, and writing.

Honors and awards include the Pollock-Krasner Award; MAP Fund; MacDowell; MAAA, Skowhegan; Rijksakademie; Whitney ISP; Franklin Furnace; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Black Spatial Relics, and Flaherty Film Seminar, amongst others. Selec exhibitions include the Drawing Center (US), Nest (NL), ICA-Philadelphia (US), REDCAT (US), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Project Row Houses (US), and SculptureCenter (US), and SFMOMA (US). Campbell’s writing has been featured in World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic.

Campbell is a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021) living and working in Oklahoma. Campbell is founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com.