She earned her PhD in the Graduate Program in African Diaspora Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. As a scholar, her work examines Black and Indigenous women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean; authoritarianism and Latin American statecraft; race, energy, and environmental politics in the African Diaspora; and Black feminist/queer aesthetics and visual culture. She is a recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright award, the Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellowships, and the Hellman Fellows Awards at the University of California-Berkeley. As a scholar her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, NACLA, Current History, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, Asterix, Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic, Best American Travel Writing 2020, Best American Magazine Writing 2023, and Gender: Space from the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook series. She is a regular contributing writer and editor-at-large for Stranger’s Guide, an ASME-award winning magazine about place and culture. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press, 2023).
Photo by Diamela Cutiño.
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Thematically, her work is concerned with ancestral memory, African-based spiritual traditions, ecology, black place-making, and the everyday ritual aesthetics of diasporic communities. She explores how we inhabit places and how places come to inhabit us. This interplay between landscapes and human subjectivity is evident in the ways that she uses her own body to reimagine black people’s relationships to the complex social and natural landscapes in which they live. She has shown work at the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, the Photographic Center Northwest, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, Spain) , the Jordan Schnitzer Museum, Fototeca de Havana, the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), JACK (Brooklyn), SOMArts (SF), C3A (Córdoba, Spain), A.I.R. Gallery, Performance Space New York, and the Berkeley Art Center. She is a national member of the AIR Gallery and an alumna of The Austin Project, founded by Omi Jones and facilitated by Sharon Bridgforth.