Bio
Jeremy Kamal is an artist engaging CGI storytelling to explore relationships between Blackness, technology, and ecology. His focus on landscape-centric narratives is the driving force behind the worlds he brings to life through 3D animation, sound, worldbuillding, and mythology. As a visual artist, he is preoccupied with depicting authentic Black aesthetics through CG. As a storyteller, he engages Afrofuturist geomyths that put Black culture, technology, and nature in symbiosis and productive friction.
Kamal is a NEW INC/ONX fellow and was previously an artist resident at the Sundance Institute, NYU ITP, Folly Tree Arboretum, and AFROTECTOPIA. He is a design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and holds a Masters of Landscape Architecture from Harvard GSD and a Master of Arts from SCI-Arc’s Fiction and Entertainment program.
INSTA / VIM
jk@jeremykamal.com
Statement
The tilling machine, the cotton extractor, and the excavator condensed into a single unit; a single body. Black American labor has geoengineered many of our landscapes, yet their values are rarely embedded in them. My work uses 3D animation and fiction to reimagine our landscapes through a contemporary Black gaze.
I create narrative vignettes of Afrouturist ecologies experienced through short films and video installations. Using high-fidelity 3D assets, motion-capture animation, and sound, I depict authentic Black aesthetics and experiences in CG. My audience witnesses music producers controlling watersheds with mixing boards, flex artists shaping earth through dance, and spiritual seekers terraforming planets through pilgrimage. I tell visual stories that reunite the Black body with its origins as an “Earth Shaper”. Embuing them with a sense of agency, the hands that once worked the land for labor now shape the land through leisure.
I am driven by my belief in the need for new geomythologies that offer alternative ways of relating to ecology without muting cultural expression. I confront the exclusionary dynamics of landscape history through spatial narratives that place culture in symbiosis with technology and nature. Each work promotes Black imagination and calls for its presence in underexplored territories.
Awards + Residencies
2022 Folly Tree Arboretum Art Residency
2021 NYU ITP Postgrad Fellow
2021 New Forms Residency
2020 ONX Studio Fellowship
2020 Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship
2019 Alfred P. Sload Foundation Award
2017 Norman T. Newton Prize
Artist Talks
2023 Columbia University GSAPP Artist Talk
2022 UCLA Sci Art Lab Artist Talk
2021 Reassemble Lab Artist Talk+ Workshop
2021 University of Pennsylvania - Artist Talk
2020 SCI Arc Black Lives Matter Action Week Artist Talk
2020 Afrotectopia Artist
2019 University of British Colombia “Forbidden Fruit” Artist Talk + Workshop
2019 University of Viriginia Workshop “Realtime Storytelling”
Press + Screenings
2023 TORRENTS: New Links to Black Futures
2021 Around the World Summit
2020 Archinect
2020 Dezeen Magazine
Exhibits
2023 Venice Biennale Vernissage x Metrotopia Metaverse
2022 Venice Biennale of Architecture
2020 ONX Studio Showcase