Brooklyn NY

Reparations in Public Space is an exhibition that strives to change spatial narratives through a series of speculative design ideas that transform spaces of trauma into spaces of healing and liberation.

Springfield, VA

JUXTAPOSE is a new way of doing installations for shows and museums where we give credit to unnamed creators, their culture, their skills and unique contribution while we use the references as a way to create new things that can be attributed back to the Black culture.

Chicago, IL & Providence, RI

(Un)Imagined Lives is a multimedia film project using co-authored ethnographic research from areas of contested ownership and colonial occupation to create both a physical and digital archive concerning the spiritual offspring of the Queer Black folx lost during the Middle Passage.

Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design

The Kaya Pavilion proposes a space for learning, gathering, play, and rest. Proposed to be installed in a city where public space is utilized as an abstract concept, this project will reveal the impact of planning for human encounters and the coexistence of multiple publics.

Art History & Curatorial Studies, Spelman College

The project aims to cultivate an institutional space that centers and reflects a consciousness solely rooted in the experiences of Black Americans in the South. The architecture of Souf, a hub of Southern Black Intellectual Thought, will exist as a campus that embodies the cultural aesthetics of Southern Black expression. Janiya proposed an architectural design for a community-arts institution that centers on the ancestral experiences and lineage of Southern Black Cultural expression.

New Genres, University of California Los Angeles

Exploring the dual nature of flight and migration as a means of survival and preservation, this six-foot soil sculpture will pay homage to the interconnected histories in the soil and land from which they are created. Mimicking the appearance of a core sample (a section of a naturally occurring substance such as earth or corporeal matter), the sculpture will speak particularly to diasporic resilience through the lens of place and belonging. A video will be projected onto the sculpture to draw micro and macro parallels between objects, images, family narrative, historical moments, landscapes, and the afterlife of slavery.

Photography, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University

"Ena D)" a mother's love is an exploration of the mother's role in different family dynamics throughout the African continent and the diaspora. This visual storytelling project will serve as a catalyst for healing and understanding the role of mothers and the value of becoming your own.