b. 2001 Fort Riley, KS
JaLeel makes performances, photographs, videos, and textiles as an extended practice of black study. Their work is grounded in the (wayward, fugitive) everyday performance of black vernacular life.
In their making process, they float between theater, cultural signifiers, and recitations of original and pre-existing African-American vernacular to “describe the life that oscillates among the categories of domestic, whore, slave, and corpse” (Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments).
Their interest lies in how performance, when used as a process-based tool, can help evolve experiences that reconnect people to severed lines of thinking not found in an institution, but at landmarks of communal exchange and internalization. I rely on failure, experimentation, and looking backwards as a means of renegotiating what I think I know about blackness and the lived experience. By foregrounding process and collaboration, I challenge the idea that knowledge is held only within documents and essays.
JaLeel received their BFA in Photography & Sculpture (2023) from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Art (2025). Jaleel has performed at the Harvard ArtLab, Massachusetts (2026), and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2026). They have shown at Featherstone Arts Center (2026), Picture Theory (2025 & 2024), IA&A at Hillyer (2023), Griffin Museum of Photography, Massachusetts (2022), and University Hall Gallery (2021)
In their making process, they float between theater, cultural signifiers, and recitations of original and pre-existing African-American vernacular to “describe the life that oscillates among the categories of domestic, whore, slave, and corpse” (Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments).
Their interest lies in how performance, when used as a process-based tool, can help evolve experiences that reconnect people to severed lines of thinking not found in an institution, but at landmarks of communal exchange and internalization. I rely on failure, experimentation, and looking backwards as a means of renegotiating what I think I know about blackness and the lived experience. By foregrounding process and collaboration, I challenge the idea that knowledge is held only within documents and essays.
JaLeel received their BFA in Photography & Sculpture (2023) from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Art (2025). Jaleel has performed at the Harvard ArtLab, Massachusetts (2026), and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2026). They have shown at Featherstone Arts Center (2026), Picture Theory (2025 & 2024), IA&A at Hillyer (2023), Griffin Museum of Photography, Massachusetts (2022), and University Hall Gallery (2021)
Portrait: Samuel Chance Alecia