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fayemi shakur is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and arts advocate residing in Newark, New Jersey. She currently serves as Arts and Cultural Affairs Director for the City of Newark. She has held appointments as Visiting Lecturer at Rutgers University-Newark, Department of Art, Culture and Media and Artist Advisory Council Member for Newark Arts.

As a cultural critic and interdisciplinary artist, her writing has been featured in national and international outlets including The New York Times, Hyperallergic, CNN Style, VICE, The International Review of African American Art, Nueva Luz Photographic Journal, HYCIDE magazine, and MFON: Women Photographers in the African Diaspora among other books and publications.

She was selected for several artist residencies in 2019 that include Critical Studies Artist in Residence at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Artist in Residence at Shine Portrait Studio, and Feminist in Residence at Project for Empty Space.

In 2019, she founded A Womb of Violet, a project-based collective of Black women writers, poets and interdisciplinary artists and published a 146-page limited edition, risograph artbook, “A Womb of Violet: An Anthology”, featuring a collection of contemporary voices in poetry and art by Black women artists that pay homage to the work of Black feminist/womanist thinkers. The anthology is archived in collections at The Newark Public Library, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and The Library of Congress. The collective also visualized and executed a 10 stories high collaborative mural, “Magnitude and Bond” in partnership with The Four Corners Public Arts Project and muralists Layqa Nuna Yawar and Kelley Prevard.

In her ongoing photo series “Ways of Being”, she blends her interest in studio portraiture with fashion photography to experiment with light while exploring aspects of identity, culture, healing, personal agency, and the body.