Emily Carris-Duncan is an artist and founder of The Art Dept, a non-profit interdisciplinary studio and community creative space dedicated to the work of marginalized creative practitioners. She/they have a BA in education and photography from Eugene Lang College in New York and holds a master's degree in photography from UCA in Kent, England. Their work exploring the personal and cultural legacy of slavery and the Black female body has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Cooper Union in, Islington Art Factory in London, The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, as well as EFA Project Space in New York. They are currently a visiting fellow at The Center For Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. They live and work in Philadelphia.
"Much of my work is born out of a search for self and a desire to heal historical wounds. As a trans-racially adopted black queer non binary person raised in modern America my story is incomplete, riddled with holes; a result of malicious neglect and the casualty of power, supremacy, domination, and shame.
I seek to unearth and preserve the untold stories of my ancestors while morphing the everyday objects that hold the traces of their pain and thereby my own. I have created pieces that interweave my experience as their descendant, with their stories so often overlooked and untold."
-Emily Carris-Duncan