Jada-Amina is a Black Indigenous American new genres artist, curator, and cultural worker born and based on the South Side of Chicago. Their practice, encompassing sound, writing, video, and collage, takes instruction from the ancestral, the current, and the unsung, archiving, excavating, and exalting the nuances of Black life across space and time. Guided by Zora Neale Hurston’s proverbial wisdom, Jada-Amina 'does not weep at the world’, building altars and resurrecting the relics of collective memory by sampling cultural data and interrogating the socio-emotional economics of material attuned to its racial, class, gender, and erotic dimensions. Recalling in the tradition of Black feminist thought and the Black maternal labor of care Jada-Amina seeks to tender a melody through the drone of the postcolonial landscape.
As an independent scholar and psalmist their work is deeply rooted in a spirit led line of inquiry. In their work as a Programmer at Old Town School of Folk Music they bring interdisciplinary folk art and cultural enrichment to Chicago Public Schools and neighborhoods on the South and West Side. Housed by The Gene Siskel Film Center, a public program of The Art Institute, they serve as Curator of Black Harvest Film Festival, exhibiting contemporary, emerging, and reparatory Black Cinema.
They are a co-founder of Rise High, a holistic integrated High School centered on meeting the unique needs of youth navigating foster care and housing instability. They are the former curator of the touring film program Loved Ones: Not Far From Here and programmer of Passion to Profession, a space for youth and professional artists to imagine sustainable pathways in the arts. Their work and projects have been mounted at ACRE Projects, UChicago’s Doc Films, South Side Community Art Center, The Music Box, OTIS College of Art and Design, Echo Park Film Center, Roots & Culture and The Gene Siskel Film Center.
Jada-Amina is the seed sown by Afro Indigenous sharecroppers, preachers, larks and midwives from Little Rock and Marvel, Arkansas and Cade, Louisiana of St.Martin.