PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | US | 2022
Kierra Branker
“Kierra Branker’s staged portraiture and tableaus mix patterns and symbols to communicate a complex experience of hybridized culture.”
– Adama Delphine Fawundu & Klea McKenna (2022 Jury).
Image © Kierra Branker. Mother’s Child Courtesy of the artist.
“[…] My practice delves deeper into my life experience and how photographs can activate generational memory, history, and cultural traditions. Cultural artifacts, social spaces, and heirlooms become catalysts for uncovering the truths and myths within ourselves. Home has always been the main theme in the work I create as the word conjures up many associations depending on who you speak to... By analyzing this I am constructing images in intimate spaces while creating work that parallels my own experience of the heritage of a distant home. […] ”
Kierra Branker is a Trinidadian-American lens-based artist based in Orlando, FL. She graduated from Parsons School of Design, receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography in 2019. Motivated by the cultural markers that help to formulate self-identity, her goal is to create works that reflect the shared heritage of the Caribbean diaspora.
After graduating, she moved back home to continue her photographic practice in Central Florida. In 2020, she documented the “RISE” The Mural Project based in Eatonville, FL, photographing residents of Apopka, Florida, highlighting the Black and Brown farmworkers in that community, and photographing products from Black-owned businesses, bringing her photographic training to each of these endeavors.
Within the last two years, she’s been nominated for an Aperture’s Next Step Award, sold work as a part of Baxter Street’s Artists in Focus, and featured in Fraction Magazine, and Musée Magazine.
She is also the co-founder of Black Shell Studio, a creative studio built to support the Black businesses and Creators of Central FL.
