zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal is a multidisciplinary artist who 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 photographic image-making, video assemblage, sound, collage, drawing, and found images. She seeks to reinforce a different kind of looking and being 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 who she belongs to across time, location, and space. Ultimately, she intends for her work to encourage ways of being and feeling beyond the systems we inhabit.
zakkiyyah has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had several solo exhibitions which include Arts and Public Life at University of Chicago and Washington University. Her work has been presented in various forms at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, NADA, The Art Institute of Chicago, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, South Bend Museum of art, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, DePaul University, EXPO Chicago, and Harvard Graduate School of Design to name a few. She has curated exhibitions at Chicago Art Department, South Side Community Art Center and Washington Park Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago. She was a 2021 Artist in Residence at Arts and Public Life at University of Chicago, a 2021 Artist in Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, a 2022 3Arts Gary & Denise Gardner Fund Awardee, and more recently a Villa Albertine Laureate Awardee for ChicagolandSeen Commission (2023-24). Her work is represented in both private and public collections, including the Block Museum at Northwestern University and Eskenazi Museum of Art. She is currently pursuing a MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
zakkiyyah is also co-founder and co-organizer 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.