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Pamela Woolford

Animation / Video / Film, Dance, Fiction, Literary, Multidisciplinary, Multidisciplinary Art, Multimedia, Performance, Performance Art, Poetry, Prose, Sculpture / Installation, Theatre, Visual / Media

I have been writing about my own life and the lives of, most often, Black artists, scholars, families, and neighbors as a memoirist, profile writer, and fiction writer for more than thirty years. I adapt the scripts for my performance and film work from these writings which I continue to create today. These writings take varied forms, such as memoir-in-verse, an essay about a photograph, and a short story based on the tales my mother told me in childhood about her own life as a child.

In my performance, film, and immersive-media work, I center my own Black, womanly, middle-aged body or voice and utilize movement-based art, 3D animation, sound and voiceover experimentation, and other nontraditional approaches to convey intimate moments and memories and the relationship between memory and imagination. Much of my work is inspired by my curiosity about the unveiling of truth through memory.

About the Artist

Pamela Woolford is an interdisciplinary artist and keynote speaker, intertwining her work as a writer, filmmaker, performer, and immersive-media director to create new forms of narrative work about Black women and girls and others whose joy, imagination, and inner life are under-explored in American media and popular art. She is the recipient of six Maryland State Arts Council Awards, five film-festival awards internationally, a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon Foundation, and a Baker Artist Award in interdisciplinary arts.\ She is the author of more than 100 memoir, fiction, profile, human-interest, and think pieces published in The Baltimore Sun, Poets & Writers Magazine, NAACP's Crisis Magazine, Harvard University’s Transition, and other publications. Her writings have been selected for anthologies, translated into German, and widely cited. She has been awarded a Storyknife Writers Residency, a NES Artist Residency, and an Official Citation from the Maryland House of Delegates and has been a Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University. Her virtual-reality show Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford’s Cabin Windows premieres spring 2022 at a four-month solo show of her work at Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery in Washington, DC. To find out more about Woolford and her art, visit pamelawoolford.com.

Pamela Woolford website Pamela Woolford Portfolio

Artist's Statement

My intent is to amplify Black people's histories, emotional range, and inner lives, increasing visibility of people like me who are underrepresented in both traditional and experimental art spaces. I work to offer us a place for communing, a place for seeing, hearing, and remembering ourselves in new ways that recall old memories, feelings, trials, and triumphs. Other people (and empathy) are also there, welcome, and touched.