Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Photography, video, installation, performance
Website: courtneydesireemorris.com
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her doctorate in African Diaspora Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is based in Berkeley, California, where she teaches and maintains an active studio practice.
Morris’s scholarly and artistic careers are deeply intertwined. Her research examines Black and Indigenous women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, authoritarianism and statecraft, and the racial politics of energy production and environmental dispossession. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press, 2023). Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, NACLA: Report on the Americas, Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and Best American Travel Writing 2020, and she serves as contributing writer and editor-at-large for Stranger’s Guide.
She has received a Fulbright Award, Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships, Hellman Fellows Awards from UC Berkeley, a Global South Fellowship from Tulane University’s Global Humanities Center (2021), and is a national member of A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited internationally across institutions including the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Morris works primarily in large-format portraiture and landscape photography, multi-channel video installation, performance, and installation art. Her practice is rooted in Black feminist aesthetics and African-based spiritual traditions, drawing particularly on Yoruba and Santería cosmologies — especially the figure of Yemaya, the ocean orisha of motherhood — as frameworks for exploring grief, healing, erotics, and ecological belonging. Her photographs function simultaneously as documentary evidence and devotional objects, collapsing the distinction between archive and altar.
Her work consistently investigates what she calls “black place-making”: the ways Black diasporic communities have created and sustained attachment to land and environment, and the grief — solastalgia — that accompanies their displacement by industrial and state violence. Whether photographing her family’s ancestral community in Mossville, Louisiana, or assembling installation altars from shells gathered across Caribbean and U.S. coastlines, Morris centers the experiences of Black women and female ancestors whose stories are absent from official histories. The result is a practice that holds mourning and celebration in the same frame, honoring the spiritual and ecological dimensions of Black life.
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