Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working through archives and omissions, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s recent works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps in the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, 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, salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification, or reference traces of US colonialism in the Philippines.
A featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka. Campbell’s films and art have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT List Visual Arts Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, The Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, Museum of Modern Art, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Artissima, Studio Museum of Harlem, Bemis, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, Semana Cinema de Negro in Belo Horizonte and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, amongst others. Campbell’s film REVOLVER received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival (an Academy Award Qualifying Festival). Campbell will have their first solo museum exhibition at St. Louis Art Museum in Fall 2024.
Other honors include a 2024 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Film/Video, 2022 Creative Capital Award, Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Black Spatial Relics, and DUKE DocX Fellowship. Campbell’s writing is featured in two artist books published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo who lives and works between Oklahoma and New York.