Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (2023, Rutgers University Press). Her work focuses on examining ancestral narratives and everyday ritual aesthetics of communities throughout the African Diaspora.
Morris has shown work and performed at the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery (Oakland, CA), the Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA), the San Francisco LGBT Center, Root Division (San Francisco), the Frye Museum (Seattle, WA), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, Spain), the Jordan Schnitzer Museum (Eugene, OR), Fototeca de Havana (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Slash SF, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), JACK (Brooklyn, NY), the San Francisco Public Library, SOMArts (SF), and C3A—Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (Córdoba, Spain), A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Performance Space New York, and the Berkeley Art Center. She is a national member of the A.I.R. Gallery and an alumna of The Austin Project.
