2025–2026
USA
Ayanna Dozier (USA) is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, artist, and writer working with performance, experimental and narrative film, installation, printmaking, and analog photography. Her current research and artwork examine how transactional intimacy (like sex work) redistributes care from the private sector into the public, social politics of relations. She received an MA from New York University (2014) and a PhD in art history and communication studies from McGill University (2020). Exhibitions of her work have been held at institutions including BRIC, Microscope Gallery, Block Museum, MoCA, Hauser & Wirth, PLATFORM Centre, and the Shed, with festival screenings include Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, Open City Documentary Festival, Aesthetica Film Festival, and FICValdivia. Dozier was recently a 2025 NYC resident for Residency Unlimited and was previously awarded a 2024 workspace residency at Penumbra, a 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace Resident (Bronx, NY), a 2018–2019 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellowship from 2017–2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). Her film work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Museum of African American Museum of History and Culture. Her first narrative mid-length film, Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water, had its debut at the Walker Art Center in spring 2025. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020) for Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series, and is preparing a manuscript tentatively titled The Pull to Trigger: Perversion, Race, and Sex in Women’s Experimental Media. She is an assistant professor in film studies in the Department of Communication at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“While Dozier is interested in ‘the all-powerful gaze of the camera’ and the cinematic apparatus, she’s equally interested in subverting that power. Dozier’s filmography celebrates Black Femmes and queer desire, while also interrogating the politics of the gaze and the transactional intimacy inherent to most sex work. As a result, her films are less interested in a nameless, faceless spectator, than in an embodied and social audience. Filmed almost exclusively on Super 8, Dozier’s films underscore the physical materiality of bodies, capital, and celluloid.” —Hannah Bonner, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival
FULL TEXT OF “INTIMATE EXCHANGES: THE FILMS OF AYANNA DOZIER” BY HANNAH BONNER
TEXT FOR AYANNA DOZIER’S “GET ON YOUR KNEES, JESUS LOVES YOU” PHOTO EXHIBITION AT MICROSCOPE GALLERY