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 photography, 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, Centre Pompidou, The Art Institute of Chicago, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, DePaul University, EXPO Chicago, and Harvard Graduate School of Design to name a few. She’s been a Villa Albertine Laureate Awardee for ChicagolandSeen Commission (2023-24), Artist in Residence with the Camargo Foundation, FR (24'), and more recently a Mona Hatoum Foundation Scholar, UK (25-26'). 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 a MA Fine Art candidate at Central Saint Martins, UAL, to be completed summer 2026.