Denali Jöel is a non-binary Multidisciplinary Artist, Designer, Educator and Fashion Griot*, born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and has been an asylum seeker living in the US since 2014, recently naturalized as a citizen. Their art praxis intersects design, performance, media and community engagement with particular focus on queer identities and Afro-diasporan histories, futures, collective healing, and radical imagination.
They approach cloth as a metaphor for futurity and heritage garments as living texts/archives and weave the two temporal experiences together to foreground the process of radical world-building that honors the past and conjugates the future. It is part of an ongoing personal inquiry and discovery of who they are (individually and collectively) as a liberated being. Their praxis is guided by three Afro-indigenous philosophies: Ubuntu, Asa, and Sankofa.
Their most noted work entitled ‘Songs Of The Gullah’ was created in collaboration with the Gullah/Geechee Nation to support their land legacy initiative during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was shared as a devised performance at the Weeksville Heritage Centre and the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC respectively. In 2021, the fashion story and film were recently part of a collective exhibition entitled ‘History Is Rarely Black or White’ at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Ontario, Canada.
Currently, based in Southern California, they were recently awarded for their photographic series The 13 Black Pillars in the inaugural Black Identity Photography Exhibition at San Diego City College’s Luxe Gallery.
* - A storyteller and repository who maintains a tradition of oral history, mainly originating in parts of West Africa.
