Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, film, installation
Website: adrianburrell.art
Adrian Levi Burrell (b. 1990, Oakland, CA) is a third-generation Oakland artist working across photography, film, installation, and experimental media. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, he earned a BFA in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, where he also served as a visiting artist with Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts (2022) and as Black Graduate Student Community Outreach Chair. His upbringing in Oakland, family roots stretching back through the Great Migration, and personal experience with the city’s ongoing transformation have shaped every dimension of his practice.
Burrell’s work has been exhibited widely, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of California to international venues including the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China and Photoville in New York. His short documentary The Game God(S) premiered via The New Yorker in 2022, and his first monograph, Sugarcane and Lightning, was published by Minor Matters Books in 2023. In 2024 he was awarded the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Arts Fellowship — a $100,000 unrestricted grant — in recognition of his contributions to the Bay Area’s cultural ecosystem.
Burrell describes his practice as rooted in “collective family storytelling,” using photography, film, site-specific sculpture, and installation to unpack historical narratives through intimate, multigenerational lenses. His work foregrounds oral tradition, archival materials, and collaborative portraiture as tools for what he calls “rememory” — a healing practice that is simultaneously a means of imagining futures not yet realized. Recurring motifs include the female elders of his family as collective self-portraits representing broader Black diasporic experience, blue as a liminal conceptual and material element, and the intersection of private grief with public histories of displacement, plantation economies, and urban dispossession.
His projects resist the boundaries between still photography and moving image, often weaving together documentary footage, posed portraiture, archival documents, genealogical research, and sculptural elements — including large-scale sugar-cane installations and bottle-tree sculptures drawn from African American folk traditions — into sprawling, immersive environments. Where his photography is formally precise and frontally composed, his films embrace the vernacular footage of family life: block parties, funerals, and everyday rituals that carry the weight of history.
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