VALERIE CAESAR

is a Brooklyn artist. She utilizes a dynamic mix of media, including photography, video, sculpture, printmaking, illustration, and animation. Her artistic practice centers around self-portraiture as it relates to Diasporic self-discovery in urban city centers. Her work has been exhibited in local and national galleries, including Woman Made Gallery, Skylight Gallery, The Gallery at National Black Theater, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI), and the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts (MOCADA), and Gris Gris Lab. Valerie’s poetry is published in Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, edited by Tony Medina & Louis Reyes Rivera, with foreword by Sonia Sanchez, and some of her photography can be found in the photo collection Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, edited by Laylah Barrayn and Delphine Fawundu, and introduced by Deborah Willis.

A graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University School of Law, Ms. Caesar was the 2012 Volkswagen Fellow of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 2014 became the first recipient of The Marilyn Nance Archive Fellowship. In 2016, Valerie presented on FESTAC ’77 and the Black Archive in the Context of Mentorship – a collaboration with her mentors, artists Valerie Maynard and Marilyn Nance, at the 2016 Black Portraitures Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. View her original photographs from this amazing experience here. Valerie was responsible, among other things, for the complete digitization of thousands of photographer Marilyn Nance’s FESTAC ‘77 photographs, resulting in exhibitions and ultimately in the historical photo book, Marilyn Nance: Last Day In Lagos, published in 2022.

She is an advisory board member for the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Umbra Search, a digital archive of African American art and artifacts. Valerie was an 2016 Independent Video Producer of the award-winning Media Share Program at BRIC Media Arts House. In 2018 she was awarded the Olson Innovation Artist-in-Residence from the University of Minnesota to do research in their rare literature archives, which contain the personal affects and early writings of Black women writers like Lucille Clifton and Audre Lorde. This work culminated in a thesis video, which illuminates some of the powerful themes that were being revealed to her as she worked my way through the archive, presented at the AIR Capstone Event, entitled The Black Magic Woman Project. You can view it here.

From 2014 to the present, Ms. Caesar has worked as an editor for NPR programming, including Serial and This American Life, and is a designer, teaching artist and media consultant for museums, archives, theater and public radio for institutions including Pioneer Works, Johns Hopkins University, and National Black Theatre. She was recently awarded a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA (New York Fellowship for the Arts) Fellowship and grant for her experimental documentary video work in the category of Digital/Electronic Arts.