*POSTER COMING SOON

BIOGRAPHY
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​Crystal Z Campbell is an experimental filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. In their sonically driven films, Campbell centers the underloved and finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken.

Campbell was the 2021 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts and was a featured filmmaker of the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka. 

Campbell's artworks and moving image projects probe historical amnesia and reimagine archival fragments. Campbell's work engages with the history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre; medical ethics and Henrietta Lacks's “immortal” cell line; gentrification via a 35mm film relic salvaged from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn (The Slave Theater); embodiment, migration, and unsolicited monuments in a Swedish coastal village; and environmental racism, water, and what remains sacred. 

Campbell’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally: Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Artists Space, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Everson Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Bemis, Walker Art Center, European Media Art Festival (EMAF), The Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Prismatic Ground, Artissima, Studio Museum of Harlem, Bemis, Semana de Cinema Negro in Belo Horizonte, Project Row Houses, Museum of Glass, SculptureCenter, EMPAC, and DocLisboa, amongst others. In 2024, the St. Louis Art Museum featured a solo exhibition of Campbell's work.

Campbell's additional honors include a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center Fellowship, Pollock- Krasner Award, MAP Fund, Duke Center for Documentary Studies Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Award, and others from MacDowell, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, and Black Spatial Relics.

Campbell’s writing is featured in two artist books published by Visual Studies Workshop Press and the artist has made contributions to World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, Hyperallergic and Beacon Press.

Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo in New York.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, FALL 2026
CRYSTAL Z CAMPBELL
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PROGRAM ONE: Wednesday, October 28th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

Futures for Failures (2011)
Futures for Failures is a double narrative of failure: architectural and social. Archival footage from a demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe building in St. Louis manifests as the materialization of modernity’s failure. Meanwhile, an intimate voiceover recounts a moment of laughter erupting during a stranger’s funeral, staging anachronous conversation between the disappeared and the disappearing.
 
REVOLVER (2022)
REVOLVER is a short film that weaves the perceptual phenomenon of pareidolia (a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist) with an oral history narrated by a descendent of Exodusters. Nicodemus, Kansas (USA) was deemed a late 19th century refuge for Exodusters—Black people from the southern United States who fled violence and inequities following the Civil War. Guided by memory, history, and rumor of a Black utopia, REVOLVER proposes a psychogeographic history of place infused with visions and dreams.
 
VIEWFINDER (2020)
Filmed entirely in Sweden, VIEWFINDER is a surreal sound-film that entangles gestures of place, belonging, and monument. Informed by archival research, oral history, and folk stories, the film focuses on Black immigrants who have recently migrated to Sweden. These performers enact dance-like choreographies in critical sites across the coastal town of Varberg, generated in response to an absence of Black life found in the municipal archives. The film loosely associates unsolicited monuments, embodiment/movement, and immigration/assimilation to frame the question: who and what begets naming and remembrance within national identity and collective memory?
 
A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse (2017)
A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse is a poetic glimpse into the ways centuries of extraction, racism, pollution, and nature's commodification have altered our relationship to sacred land, water, and resources. A constellation of intersecting histories and source material include testimony from a Water Protector at Standing Rock protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, contaminated water in Flint Michigan, and original footage of Hierve el Agua near Oaxaca, Mexico, a rock formation revered for its healing properties. Interspersed are archival images of gardens, hands of artists and children brushing their teeth—a reflection on the innocuous ways in which contaminated water and resources shape the banal rituals of individuals' lives. A watermark on the image extends the water spill, branding testimony and blocking access, ultimately deciding who will control critical narratives of environmental racism and discourse.

PROGRAM TWO: Thursday, October 29th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

On the Way to the Earth, We Discovered the Moon (2013)
On the Way to the Moon, We Discovered the Earth is a short film that remixes archival material from a prominent mainstream newspaper printed during the New York City Blackout in July 1977. The 1977 New York City Blackout is cited as the official birth of hip-hop, wherein looters took equipment that allowed them to formalize and professionalize hip-hop. Titled after a quote by an astronomer looking back at the Earth during the Apollo space mission, this kaleidoscopic film hints at a cultural moment of rupture and reinvention that transcends resilience.
 
WITNESS (2010)
Witness is a perceptual meditation on police brutality—specifically a power dynamic that law enforcement has coined “suicide by cop.” Filmed in Iceland on 8mm film, the film hinges on archival audio—unfolding in real time—of a young Black man negotiating his life with the police out of frame. Repeatedly asking for the camera, he foreshadows the camera as a potential witness in his final moments, appearing hyperaware of the possibility of being erased or silenced from history. The viral internet circulation of the video is a post-mortem extension of his agency, leaking evidence while challenging the politics of witnessing and surveilling, and interrogating the blind spots of carceral justice on a public platform.
 
Flight (2021)
In this 23-minute single-channel video, Campbell reconfigures scenes from archival 16mm film footage recorded by Solomon Sir Jones in the mid-1920s, film that documents the everyday lives of Black communities in Oklahoma, an area that once boasted over fifty Black townships during Reconstruction. The film documents Black self-determination in light of the erasure and displacement of Black communities across the United States, such as the Greenwood District in Tulsa Oklahoma—the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, that persists today. Referencing impossible color theory, Campbell renders the film in washes of red and green hues—a color combination believed to be “impossible” for our eyes to see simultaneously. These colors limit visibility in these scenes of Black modernity, rupturing the legibility of the archive and the optics of this history.
 
Go-Rilla Means War (2017)
Go-Rilla Means War is a filmic relic of gentrification featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished Black Civil Rights Theater in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After finding the film unfinished and un-canned on the floor of The Slave Theater, Campbell collaborated with the unknown director (presumably amateur filmmaker Judge John Phillips who owned the Slave Theater) to finish the film. A secret Black fraternal organization dominates the visual narrative, accompanied by a parable that binds intersections of development, cultural preservation, and erasure.