Ayanna Dozier

Ayanna Dozier (PhD) is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, artist, and writer. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020), a 2021 Open Call grantee for The Shed, and was a 2018–19 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program. Her artistic practice is one of fabulation and moves beyond representation to embrace the creative and affective dimensions of what the moving image and body can manifest about people and history. She is currently a winter workspace artist in residence at Wave Hill and a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in February 2022.

GM: What was your path to becoming an artist and filmmaker?

AD: I was a musical theatre student and that extended into ballet, singing, piano, acting, stage direction, etc. I wanted to continue on that path, but realized there was going to be a lot of resistance. I wanted a path that would be met with less financial instability than acting and one that would utilize my creativity. I’ ve always loved art history, and I love to read and write. But I also wanted to develop a vocabulary around my peculiar interests in the arts, such as avant-garde theatre. Inevitably, this led me back to artistic practice. As I went to grad school, I got back into doing performance art, and ultimately was able to find my space between the conceptual and the procedural. The process of working in film allows me to retain all of my varied selves that I’ ve occupied over the last 15 years of my life.

GM: What was your experience creating and shooting your experimental short film, Softer (2020)?

AD: It was technically my first artist showing and return to art making, because when I started the PhD, I didn’t make art for three years, and that was very disastrous to my mental health and identity. I got really used to seeing myself as a background singer [because I was] writing about and amplifying other artist’s work, which is great, but I completely forgot that the whole reason why I started [the PhD] was because I was an artist who wanted to develop a more critical approach to why I’m interested in these types of art makings. I was able to do all the brunt work of the PhD [in Montreal] and then came back to New York; [I wanted to] re-acquaint myself as an artist and start making things again. My friends Elspeth Walker, David Armacost, and Jordan Bernier had a gallery at the time in the Lower East Side, Evening Hours, and they gave me an opportunity [to show my work]. I did research on Marjorie Joyner, who was the first Black person to receive a patent in 1927 on the permanent wave machine, which is a monstrous, tortuous device that I have in my closet. (Laughs) You turn it on, curl the hair, you perm it, and you clip on these electrical wired rods that connect to this unit. I was really interested in this device because it looks sci-fi and terrible, it’s just torture. When I found out that it was made by a Black woman, I was shocked, because if you look up images for it, you will not find a single Black woman. You ’ll find white women in advertisements [for it] everywhere. It’s completely fascinating that this [machine] began in Black hair culture in the early twentieth century, where in order to get a job, you needed to have a perm. I had also done research at the Schomburg Center on the Pittsburgh Courier, an early Black newspaper that ran in the 1920’s, and encountered a lot of editorials by wealthier Black women to poor Black women, forcing the brunt of respectability upon their personhood. (Continued)

Ayanna Dozier, Stills from Softer (2020)

This tension ultimately bled through the installation and turned into a short film. At the last minute, I got an actress together with her sister, wrote out a treatment, and shot it over the course of 5 hours. I just made my research points into a moving image that would be another way to reflect the same concepts that I had talked about in the show.

GM: In your opinion, what are some common roadblocks that female filmmakers deal with in the industry?

AD: What really plagues women filmmakers as a whole is the fact that it’s not even that people have a bias going into a film that’s made by a woman. It’s rather that people don’t know enough about film history. What I mean by that is if you ask them what their favorite films are, even if they ’re a woman themselves, they rarely have a top 10 that is all women filmmakers. Or if you ask them to name some women filmmakers from the 1930’s or 1950’s, they don’t have that awareness. If you don’t know the genealogy by which a contemporary artist is working from, be that an explicit citation or a backlog where you can look at their work, it’s going to be harder for you to recognize what they ’re doing and accept the terms and conditions [under which] they make their work. To me, that’s the biggest thing because it feeds into everything else – it affects funding and what gets into festivals, which critically affects distribution, the key point of how a work survives. Festival premieres and winning an award are great, but can someone pick up your film and ensure its longevity, either as a DVD or future theatrical screening? Those are the biggest roadblocks, and again those come from the lack of awareness of how to contextualize the work and how to respond to it.

GM: You are also an author and scholar – could you discuss your experience writing your doctoral dissertation, “Mnemonic Aberrations” (2020)?

AD: My dissertation was just a beast of mythical creatures that has its own world. (Laughs) When I was accepted into the PhD program, I was initially going to write a dissertation on performance art, based on the fact that I was doing performance art with a lot of underground radical queer communities in New York. When I went to Montreal in 2014, I had a conversation with one of my supervisors, where we talked about the Black avantgarde, and then I stated out loud that I didn’t think that I could name a genealogy of Black experimental filmmakers who are women. I remember going to the library to do research and realized that there was no book or Wikipedia entry at that time that you could take in about Black women experimental filmmakers. And it was a sudden but immediate change of, “Well, there’s your dissertation!” I credit my dissertation for adding onto my artistic practice, otherwise I wouldn’t be a filmmaker. In studying the films across many years of archival research in the U.K., The Camille Billops Archive in Atlanta, Georgia, the LA Rebellion Archive in Los Angeles, to various archives in New York – I realized that these filmmakers were challenging what I knew to be experimental. I didn’t know how a 16mm film camera worked, or understood how their work was experimental in contrast to the “ canon” which favors white masculine disembodied work. That’s what led me to learn the

material of the medium, and when I realized that this could be a way for me to return to art making.

“Mnemonic Aberrations” is a two-part dissertation. [The first part details] a history of Black feminist experimental filmmaking across the United States and the United Kingdom, from 1957 to 2017. The second part is a new philosophical treaty on temporality in film, as well as the heart of the dissertation and why it’s called “Mnemonic Aberrations” . That is to suggest that the way in which these Black feminist filmmakers were making film reorganized temporality outside of coloniality, but that’s based through embodiment. (Continued)

Joshua Bright, Unedited, 2022

Joshua Bright, Unedited, 2022

I wanted to think about the mnemonic of something that is not only passed down, but has a very creative reservoir for Black feminist thinking that allows us to understand that there are other ways of being in society that don’t have to affirm our subjugation. [These films] alter how we see ourselves in the world and deploy experimental tactics that have no previous written origin in the world of experimental film. It’s a lot! I’m proud of it. [I’m working on] several books that are inspired by the dissertation; it’s shaped a lot of what I’ ve done.

GM: And what about your book “The Velvet Rope” (2020), as part of the 33 1/3 series?

AD: I love “The Velvet Rope” (1997). I think we forget about the legacy of “The Velvet Rope” , because “Rhythm Nation 1814” (1989) is so good, and Janet Jackson's brilliant obviously. But “The Velvet Rope” part of me is the one that people always say, “Yeah, I skipped over that [album], I didn’t get into it. ” And for me, that [album] changed my life. I’ ve just always been attracted to it and I think it’s her most ambitious work on self-actualization, creative ambition, and experimentation (both sonically and visually). The 33 1/3 series was a great way to deliver that, in not just a scholarly and informative way, but a deeply personal way.

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice?

AD: I’m currently doing a residency at Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center in Riverdale, NY. [The project I’m working on] is a continuation of piece I started at The Shed about cemeteries and the dead. [At Wave Hill] I’m thinking of mass graves and the transformation of the daily ecological landscape of Riverdale, in relationship to the Van Courtyard Plantation that’s nearby. It’s so difficult to find the bodies of the enslaved – we know there’s mass graves there and the city had an acknowledgement of it on Juneteenth 2021 – but there’s no physicality of that. [I’m shooting] a film coming out about that. Next, there’s a continuation of my photographic practice, which primarily works with Palladium-toned Kallitypes. Scholarly wise, I’m working on the biography and manuscript of Camille Billops’s life, artwork, and filmmaking. She was the beginning source for me in looking up Black historical feminist filmmakers, so this [project] is inspired by my dissertation. Following my residency at Wave Hill, I will return to a four-part vignette series of 16mm short films that not only do I star in, but also work through 1970s and 1980s advertising culture, femininity, heartbreak, and misogynoir. My return to artmaking was picking up the camera, and now I’m getting back to performance, dancing, and acting in front of the camera.