View my CV here.

Kira Joy Williams (she/they) is an artist, storyteller, and community builder based in Brooklyn, NY on occupied Munsee Lenape land. 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. Currently a featured artist in the Black Lives, Black History, Black Joy, and Black Futures exhibition in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, Kira has also been 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 an Artist in Residence at the Mauser EcoHouse Foundation in 2025. Kira will be in residence at Alchemy Art Center in the summer of 2025. Kira believes wholeheartedly in the power of art, abundance, and mutual aid, and in her plant babies.

Kira was raised by storytellers––the power of art and story is in her bones. Returning to an art practice in 2020 after being laid off from an ad agency job, Kira sought work with culture change leaders, and was mentored 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. In their multi-media assemblage projects, photographic portraits, oral histories, and textile memorials, they nerd out on the slowness of film photography, ways of seeing, and weaving. Kira’s main thesis project strives to contribute positively and generatively to existing visual representation of Black people in the U.S. by 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. Along with concepts of diasporic home, Kira’s art explores notions of care, community, and belonging through visual media and stories. Her 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 photographs affect people, Kira engages with image-making to explore truth, collaboration, and new ways to care.

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 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