Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O'Neal

Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas O’neal is a Chicago based visual artist, educator, and independent curator. She makes work to further understand how the specificity of her own lived experiences are connected to historical and contemporary movements that involve embodied knowledge production. She explores this through social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, drawing, and found images. She seeks to reinforce a different kind of gaze (and gazing) which she processes through empathy, desire, love, queer identity, family, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. Within her projects there's an overlying theme of trying to make sense of what and to whom she belongs.

Zakkiyyah has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had several solo exhibitions at Mana Contemporary, Blanc Gallery, and South Bend Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions at spaces such as Chicago Art Department and Washington Park Arts Incubator. She is a recent recipient of Chicago Artist Coalition’s SPARK Grant and Artist Run Chicago Fund Grant. She has been an Artist in Residence at Hyde Park Art Center (2019), Artist in Residence at University of Chicago’s Arts and Public Life (2021), and most recently a Visiting Artist in Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN (2021).

Zakkiyyah is also a Co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective of Black artists, thinkers, and curators that prioritize shared experiences and concerns by lens based artists of the Black diaspora.