Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, Video, Installation, Sculpture
Website: jamilhellu.net
Jamil Hellu is a multidisciplinary visual artist born in 1976 in Curitiba, Brazil, to a Syrian father and Paraguayan mother. He lives and works in Oakland, California, and teaches photography in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. He holds a BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute (2003) and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University (2010).
Hellu’s practice is rooted in photography and extends into video, sculpture, installation, and screen-printing. His work creates personal and politically charged projects that expand discourse on identity representation, exploring the intersections of race, queerness, and cultural heritage. As a queer multiracial immigrant, his practice addresses visibility, homophobia, and racialized oppression through a collaborative and performative methodology that centers the participation of Bay Area LGBTQ+ communities.
His work is held in the collections of SFMOMA, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. He has been recognized with a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship (2018), a Lucas Artists Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center (2023), and individual artist grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Zellerbach Family Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Artforum, and VICE, and is included in the 2019 Phaidon edition of Art & Queer Culture.
Hellu works primarily in photography, employing self-portraiture as both a formal strategy and a political act. In his ongoing Hues series (2017–present), he invites LGBTQ+ collaborators to pose before solid-colored backdrops, inserting himself into each photograph to create participatory portraits examining the intersectionality of racial, gender, and sexual identities. In Odyssey (2022–present), he extends this approach into abstraction, obscuring his body beneath brightly colored fabrics, foam, and reflective materials to produce saturated, blur-streaked images in which identity appears perpetually in flux.
His broader body of work includes Be My Guest (2016–2021), a series of digitally printed rugs depicting intimate scenes between men identified as Arab, and 24 Variations for a Stoning Rock (2016), a gif animation addressing state-sanctioned violence against queer people. Across all bodies of work, Hellu treats the photographic frame as a site of negotiation between visibility and erasure, deploying his own body and those of collaborators to articulate a politics of representation for communities marginalized by dominant culture.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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