Jada-Amina (b. 1995)  is a South Side Chicago born and based, Black Indigenous American interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker. For Jada-Amina, remembering is the ancestral technology tethering cosmic currents and the ravines of our past. Their sound, video and other collage work exalts the materiality of fragmentation. Transposing the analog and sampling cultural data from both their personal archive and the public domain, they contemplate the potential of the extended portrait as a portal in which spirits transpose the static of the photograph. The speculative and the surreal are deployed to encode the immateriality of memory. Gospel is the promise of a world beyond, tendering alternative melody to the melancholy of postcolonial worlds. Using the hymn as a compass, Jada-Amina hums through the hush harbor, forging new ways of being. 

 

Jada-Amina is the seed sown by sharecroppers, preachers, larks and midwives from Little Rock and Marvel, Arkansas and Cade, Louisiana of St.Martin Parish. 

​

A devoted advocate for arts education accessibility, in 2016 Jada-Amina co-curated Passion to Profession. This discussion-based workshop series aims to create a welcoming, informative, and productive space for youth and curious creatives to work with practicing artists — both established and up-and-coming — in imagining pathways for pursuing a sustainable career in the arts. For two years the independent program was facilitated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. 

They received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in New Genres and Art History. 

 

They are the former co-curator of Loved Ones Presents: Not Far From Here. A touring program of film screenings and programming.

​

​