Kira Joy Williams (she/they) is an artist, community builder, and creative thinker living, loving, and working in the East Bay, CA on unceded Ohlone, Muwekma, Confederated Villages of Lisjan, and Miwok land.
I strive to understand my place within the legacy of colonization and to act in solidarity with the timeless people who are the original stewards of the land that sustains my life. I work to honor and respect this Earth and her people, past, present, and future. What land are you on and why is it important? Visit native-land.ca to find out.
-
Kira Joy Williams (she/they) is a multimedia artist, storyteller, and community builder. Her photo-based multimedia artwork has been featured in powerful solo and group exhibitions. In 2022, Kira installed their solo thesis exhibition, Home is in the Stories, at a local community garden in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. As the garden's Artist-in-Residence, they hosted community events following the exhibit opening, including a film screening, performances, and a dreamwork collaging session. Kira has been a featured artist in the Black Lives, Black History, Black Joy, and Black Futures (2024-2025) exhibition in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn and an artist and co-curator for the Rest is Power (2023) and Morphology (2022) exhibitions at New York University. Since her first self-curated solo exhibition, Coping and Conquering (2016) in Washington, D.C., she has been featured in other group exhibitions including the Tisch Department of Photography and Imaging faculty show, Mirror With A Memory: DPI 40th Anniversary Exhibition (2023) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Photoville Festival. Kira received a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University in 2015 and a Master's degree from Gallatin in 2023. They were a 2023 Create Change Artist-in-Residence with The Laundromat Project, and in 2025, an Artist in Residence at both the Mauser EcoHouse Foundation in Costa Rica and the Alchemy Art Center in Washington. Kira believes wholeheartedly in the power of art, abundance, and mutual aid, and in her plant babies.
-
Kira (she/they) was raised by storytellers––the power of art and story is in her bones. Kira has been mentored by culture change leaders in how to use art to change the world. She is guided by love, joy, and revolution, letting deep care for the Earth and its inhabitants lead her storytelling.
Kira is building a charged sculptural universe to explore ritual, summoning, holding. Creating ceramic sculptures and vessels, they celebrate the alchemical medium and deepen a practice of ancestral memory/remembering, a sensual meditation on the wildness of humanity. Kira’s ceramic practice involves deep listening and trust and expands her vocabulary around identity, relationship with nature, and psychological space.
Along with concepts of community and belonging, Kira’s art explores diasporic home through visual media and stories. In her multi-media assemblage projects, photographic portraits, oral histories, and textile memorials, she nerds out on the slowness of film photography, ways of seeing, and weaving. Kira developed a portrait and oral history project, creating archival materials in collaboration with the very people being represented. Through photographs and interviews with participants, she explores the ways members of the African diaspora make home in the face of systemic disempowerment and pervasive racism.
Their sculptures, photographs, and recorded histories exist in the wake of longstanding memory-work traditions that make sense of the present and construct a new future––one in which we all belong. Intrigued with what academic and author Tina M. Campt calls the “sticky residue of memory and history” emanating from photographs, and the myriad ways in which art and story affect people, Kira engages with making to explore truth, collaboration, and new ways to care.
Collaboration and experimentation are vital to Kira’s practice, and she believes interrelatedness with other artists and broader community feeds her art and soul. Their artwork is deeply ingrained with and sustained by real world practices of care, service, and building relationships in the tradition of queer ecologies.
-
Artist
The Laundromat Project Women's Herstory Month Celebrations - March 2023
Brooklyn Borough President Women's History Month Announcement, "Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso Celebrates Women Storytellers With the Brooklyn Comedy Collective and The Laundromat Project in Honor of Women’s History Month" - March 31, 2023
Press Release: The Laundromat Project Announces its 2023 Create Change Artists-in-Residence and Fellows
The Patch coverage of Home is in the Stories exhibition, "Bed-Stuy Artist Explores Home" - Sep 30, 2022
Gallatin Galleries coverage of Gallatin Arts Festival, 2022
Curator
Rest is Power Exhibition:
The New Yorker, “The Visual Power of Black Rest” - October 18, 2023
Huffpost,“‘Rest is Power’ Is A Stunning Expression Of Black People Reclaiming Their Peace” - October 10, 2023
Hyperallergic,“15 Art Shows to See in New York This September” - September 13, 2023
Office Magazine, "Visual Narratives from the Black Rest Project: Rest is Power" - September 23, 2023
-
Panelist, Artist Talk, Alchemy Art Center Artists in Residence Summer Cohort, San Juan Island, Washington, 2025
Art & Writing Workshop Co-facilitator, 11th Annual Limbsnapping Festival, The Root Community, Sprakers, NY, 2024
Panelist, “Exploring Access: Building & Sustaining Communities within Urban Spaces,” Brooklyn Museum Fourth Annual Intern Convening, Brooklyn, NY, 2024
Panelist and featured essayist, Sometimes I Wander…A Photography Exhibition Celebrating the Lives of Gordon Parks and Chi Modu, Nimbus Arts Center, 2024
Featured artist, The Laundromat Project Create Change Artists-in-Residence Culminating Event, Gather, 2023
Featured artist, Brooklyn Borough President Women's History Month Celebration, 2023
Thank you for visiting!