Denali Jöel (they/them) is a Jamaican-born multidisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and fashion griot* based in Los Angeles. Their art praxis blends design, performance, visual media, and community engagement, focusing on queer identities and Afro-diasporan histories.
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.
Denali has received international recognition for their fashion film and archive 'Songs Of The Gullah' and an award by San Diego City College for their '13 Black Pillars' photographic series. They are currently a 2024 Craft Archive Fellow, EarthSeed Fellow for the Octavia Butler’s Seeding Futures at the New Children’s Museum in San Diego, and a 2023 Center for Cultural Power Culure Bearer Awardee.
* - A storyteller and repository who maintains a tradition of oral history, mainly originating in parts of West Africa.
