Imani Roach

Imani Roach is a Philadelphia based art-writer, visual artist and musician. Across disciplines, her interests include the surveillance, consumption and containment of black emotion, vulnerability and entitlement practices in urban space, gender and the public/private divide, and aging bodies in the American imaginary. Her recent sculptural work uses everyday consumables like bread and candle wax to think through issues of gender, labor and the black body. In addition to being an active member of Vox Populi, she is the Managing Editor of Artblog (an online journal for local arts criticism), a co-founder of The Lonely Painter Project (a bi-coastal performance collaborative), and an instructor at the University of the Arts, where she teaches the art of Africa and the black diaspora. She performs regularly as a vocalist in the soul, folk and jazz idioms, and, as a doctoral candidate in African Studies and Art History at Harvard, continues to chip away at her dissertation on the first generation of black South African photojournalists under Apartheid.