Courtney Desiree Morris

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist, social anthropologist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching and research encompass critical race and feminist theory, Black social movements in the Americas, women’s movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, state violence and authoritarianism, environmental politics in the African diaspora, and Black feminist and queer aesthetics. Morris earned her PhD through the Graduate Program in African Diaspora Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines Black and Indigenous women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean; authoritarianism and Latin American statecraft; the relationship between race, energy and environmental politics across the African diaspora; and Black feminist and queer visual culture. She has received numerous distinctions, including a Fulbright award, Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships, and a Hellman Fellows Award from the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly and literary work has appeared in publications including American Anthropologist, Bulletin of Latin American Research, NACLA, Current History, Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, Aster(ix), Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic, The Best American Travel Writing 2020, The Best American Magazine Writing 2023 and Gender: Space, part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender series. She is also a contributing writer and editor-at-large for Stranger’s Guide, a magazine dedicated to place and culture. Her first book, To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2023 and examines the activism of Black women on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast in the context of economic precarity, racialised dispossession and increasing authoritarianism. Morris’s artistic practice encompasses large-format portrait and landscape photography, experimental video, performance and installation. Her work explores ancestral memory, African diasporic spiritual traditions, ecology, Black place-making and the everyday ritual practices of diasporic communities. Central to her practice is an investigation of the reciprocal relationship between people and place: how individuals inhabit particular environments and how those environments, in turn, shape memory, identity and embodied experience. She frequently uses her own body to reconsider Black relationships to complex social and natural landscapes. Her work has been presented at institutions including the National Gallery of Jamaica; Ashara Ekundayo Gallery; Photographic Center Northwest; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; Fototeca de Cuba, Havana; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; JACK, Brooklyn; SOMArts, San Francisco; C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba; A.I.R. Gallery; Performance Space New York; and Berkeley Art Center. She is a National Artist Member of A.I.R. Gallery and an alumna of The Austin Project, founded by Omi Jones and facilitated by Sharon Bridgforth.