PROFILES BEYOND THE STUDIO
ASATA RADCLIFFE
Adjunct Instructor, Academic Studies Asata Radcliffe is a writer and multimedia artist. A California native, Asata received her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Antioch University in Los Angeles. She writes speculative fiction and essays. Her creative work culminates as multimedia collections of speculative art installation, merging writing, film, and form. Her work invites one to experience the interstitial spaces of speculative landscapes and surrealist futures. Concerned about the planet, her research includes topics of land ethics, futurism, and the nonlinear narratives of human existence. She currently lives and teaches in Portland, Maine. Her current project centers around the Black Guards, who were African American army soldiers sent to guard the railways of Maine during WWII, from 1941-1945. The purpose of their deployment to Maine was to prevent terrorist attacks along the railways to keep Maine citizens safe during the war. Radcliffe’s Black Guards Living project looks at the day-to-day lives of these soldiers who stood watch during a time of a racially segregated country and military, a watch that embodied the incongruity of a loyal citizen-soldier whose citizenship straddled the complex liminal state of racism, a citizenship that was exercised as a matter of convenience during war-time.
