New Artist Member: Ayanna Dozier
Posted March 9th, 2026 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, New Films, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is pleased to welcome Ayanna Dozier‘s work to the collection!
Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker-artist and writer working with performance, experimental and narrative film, installation, printmaking, and analog photography. Her current research and artwork examine how transactional intimacy (like sex work) redistributes care from the private sector into the public, social politics of relations. Her first narrative mid-length film, Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water had its debut at The Walker Art Center in the spring of 2025 and examines a dominatrix navigating a session with a client through a recent breakup. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020) and is preparing a manuscript tentatively titled, Troubling Erotics: Perversion, Race, and Risk in Film & Video. Her film work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Museum of African American Museum of History and Culture. She is an assistant professor in film studies in the Department of Communication at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
13 of Dozier’s films are now available from Canyon Cinema, including:
A Whore in the House of the Lord (2025, 10.5 minutes, color, silent, digital file)
A Whore in the House of the Lord is a 16mm color film that navigates the bind women encounter in Christian fundamentalist churches as being both the representative body of the church and the conduit in which Satan’s temptation can creep in and corrupt the saints. Inspired by the silent films of the 1920s, the film fuses gothic architecture and design with the rituals of rabid Christian fanaticism popularized in the American South.
Doing it For Daddy (2025, 3 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Doing it For Daddy is a double 8mm film printed onto 16mm film that considers how the types of gendered service labor expected of women in institutions and relationships overlap. Taking a cue from both the biographical experience of the director’s own upbringing in a Christian fundamentalist church and later relationship with sex work as well as Madonna’s influential “Like a Prayer,” it examines the psychological implications of modeling acts of service to men as an extension of how you serve God (on your knees).
Bounded Intimacy (2024, 6 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts “It’s Just Business, Baby”) examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts that was renown as a site for sex work, sex clubs, and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is “authentic.” The nature of their relationship is irrelevant as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire of the encounter between the two.
It’s Just Business, Baby (2023, 6 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
It’s Just Business, Baby (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts “It’s Just Business, Baby”) examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts that was renown as a site for sex work, sex clubs, and illicit sexual activity. The titular film of the trilogy captures an encounter between a client and a working girl where the lines of care are blurred following a session. The film repeats this encounter with the same actors switching parts to trouble the relationship of power that exists between that dynamic.
A Picture for Parco (2022, 3 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
A Picture for Parco recreates a 1980s commercial made for the Japanese department store chain by Kazumi Kurigami taking on the role previously played by an elegantly dressed Faye Dunaway sitting at a table, set against a black background, slowly and seductively eating a hardboiled egg. Filmed on the one-year anniversary of my last colposcopy, the piece evokes a range of intense feelings not present in the original. This film is part of the trilogy, “Close, but no Cigar.”
an exercise in parting (2022, 3.5 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
an exercise in parting is a poetic examination of a go-go dancer walking home from work late at night attempts to resurrect her lost childhood on kiddie rides in front of a small store. Close-up images of the artist’s face collapse into abstraction as the pony ride breaks down. This film is part of the trilogy “Close, but no Cigar.”
Forever Your Girl (2022, 7.5 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Forever Your Girl acts out the loss of childhood innocence and desire through a hypersexualized subject attempting to ride a carousel kiddie ride. Black girlhood is often an accelerated path to becoming an adult where innocence and bodily agency are denied and any attempts to return are simultaneously deemed inappropriate and unobtainable. While inspired by soft-porn aesthetics, it defies the anticipated imagery and familiar mood of pornographic content. The scenes are similarly disorienting with flashing lights, glamor aesthetics, and slow repetitive actions.
Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above (2002, 5 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Part of the trilogy “It’s Just Business, Baby,” Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea district, specifically foregrounding the act of cruising and public sex. The film (like the trilogy) intentionally lack a soundtrack to have audiences follow what the image is doing rather than the sounds associated with the image (specifically sex).
lovertits (2022, 4 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
I assume the character of a young woman who enters a love motel to re-train her emotions about love and sex in lovertits, a 4-minute film inspired in part by Charles Matton’s French erotica movie Spermula. In this version, the woman, who is seen bathing in a bikini in a heart-shaped bath, unsuccessfully attempts to embrace “superficial happiness, femininity and passiveness.” This film is part of the trilogy, “Close, but no Cigar.”
Nightwalker (2022, 7 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
“Nightwalker” codes disproportionately target Black femmes or women who “make a display” by wearing clothing that can be deemed risqué by an arresting officer. In Nightwalker (2022), a film that is an extension of a Polaroid and audio project entitled Solicitation of Crimes Against Nature (2021), I draw attention to how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. The film is ambivalent as to whether or not the character is a sex worker and is more interested in the act of surveillance “sight-based” discourse that names individuals as such.
Vincent Gallo’s Sperm (2022, 3 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
The short appropriates the personal advert page for Vincent Gallo where he sells sex and his sperm to white patrons only. The piece is an exercise in the speech-act of white cismale power and how easily it is overlooked when spoken by a man but how quickly sinister said speech-act becomes when enacted and performed by a racialized woman’s body.
Maman Brigitte (2021, 3 minutes, colors, sound, digital file)
Maman Brigitte stitches together the intimacy of a private manifestation Hoodoo vevue of Maman Brigitte (the barrier between the living and the dead) with the aurality of the body (spitting, running, vomiting, etc.). These “interior” corporeal practices are juxtaposed against sweeping landscapes to draw out film/ritual’s capacity to manifest.
Softer (2020, 4.5 minutes, color and b&w, sound, 16mm or digital file)
Softer examines the demands of “softening” that are requested of Black women’s bodies in society—from job prospects to romantic ones—be that in their voice, their manners, and, critically, their hair. The experimental short plays upon the grooming rituals of softening that are terrifyingly rough through a recreation of a permanent wave machine produced perm (popular in the 1930s-1950s). The short mediates on the historical ways in which Black women have tried to answer this demand on softness through respectable appearance and behavior.
