Ayanna Dozier

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.

Select exhibitions institutions include BRIC (Brooklyn, NY), Microscope Gallery (New York, NY), Block Museum (Chicago, IL), MoCA, Arlington (Arlington, VA), Hauser & Wirth (Los Angeles, CA), PLATFORM Centre (Winnipeg, MB), and The Shed (New York, NY). Select festival screenings include Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, Open City Documentary Festival, Aesthetica Film Festival, and FICValdivia. Dozier was recently a 2025 NYC resident for Residency Unlimited. She has been previously awarded a 2024 workspace residency at Penumbra, a 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace Resident (Bronx, NY), a 2018-2019 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow from 2017-2022 at Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). 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.

https://dozierayanna.com/

Image: Portrait by Kam Herndon, 2025