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), the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts (MOCADA), and Gris Gris Lab. Ms. Caesar’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 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.

Valerie graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, and worked as an associate editor at Lee and Low Books, an award-winning multicultural children's book publisher. Valerie served as a judge for their New Voices Award publishing prize. At Random House, Inc., she worked as an associate editor within the Bantam/Doubleday/Dell imprint for the launch of Harlem Moon, an African American imprint that featured the works of prominent and contemporary Black authors.

Ms. Caesar graduated from Columbia University School of Law, and worked at the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, focusing on legal issues related to asylum and international human rights. Valerie also taught Principles of Constitutional and Family Law at institutions around New York State.

In 2012, Ms. Caesar was named the 2012 Volkswagen Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and worked in their Education department as the Associate Director of Digital Learning, producing MoMA Online Courses, an award-winning digital educational course series, and video content on modern and contemporary art and museum conservation.

In 2014, Ms. Caesar 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, Black Arts Movement artist 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, the 2022 publication of the historical photo book, Marilyn Nance: Last Day In Lagos.

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 conduct research in their rare literature archives, exploring the personal effects and early writings of Black women writers like Lucille Clifton and Audre Lorde. This work culminated in a thesis video entitled The Black Magic Woman Project, illuminating powerful themes from the archive, and presented at the culminating AIR Capstone Event.

For the past decade, Ms. Caesar has worked as a transcript editor for broadcast programming, including the award-winning broadcasts Serial and This American Life, and as a designer, teaching artist and media consultant for museums, archives, theater and public radio, working with institutions including Pioneer Works, Johns Hopkins University, and National Black Theatre. She was recently awarded a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship and grant for her experimental documentary video work in the category of Digital/Electronic Arts.