Elissa Blount Moorhead is an artist and film director investigating the poetics of quotidian Black life. Moorhead creates films, television programs, public art, time based and expanded multimedia projects. Her work was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022. Moorhead’s career has spanned over 35 years as an artist, instructor, advocate, and programmer. Recent awards include the USA Artist Award, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fellowship, Sundance Episodic Lab, Ford Foundation /Just Films/Rockwood Fellowship, Ruby Award, Creative Capital Award, and the Baker Award Prize. Projects she has directed include; Jay Z’s short film 4:44, Apologue for The Darkest Gods for PBS, an AR/film projection installation, As of A Now, and Back and Song, a four channel film installation in collaboration with filmmaker Bradford Young. She was a writer on the upcoming Apple TV series Lady in the Lake. She is the author of P is for Pussy, an illustrated “children’s” book and is featured essayist in the anthology How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance . She was a 2020 resident at Eyebeam and a Sundance Episodic Lab participant and awarded the Comedy Central Award and the Women at Sundance Adobe Fellowship for her series entitled fiftyTWO. She was a recent Bellagio Rockefeller Resident in Bellagio Italy and Art OMI, and a featured artist in Georgia State University’s “Liquid Blackness” study symposium. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Black Cinema & Visual Culture, Art and Politics in the 21st Century. By Artel Great, Ed Guerrero (2023) and My Paik Nam June, a book published by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2024) and Doing It, Fluid: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the Making of a Moving Image Arts Community by Michele Prettyman for Duke University Press’ Journal of Black Aesthetics (2022).

Moorhead’s curatorial and advocacy work includes; co-founding Red Clay Arts in NYC where she curated/produced over 20 exhibitions and multimedia projects including; Random Occurrences, a multi- venue exhibition; Cat Calls (Street Harassment project) at St. Ann’s Warehouse and the NYC Museum; Practicum, the inaugural experimental series at Brooklyn, BRIC; FunkGodJazzMedicine, the multi-site project in partnership with NYC Creative Time; Art in Odd Places, an outdoor performance and visual art installation; and Flux Festival, an installation of time based, visual and performance work. She was VP of Programming and Exhibitions for the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn , NY and served as Program Director for Rush Arts Gallery, NYC. She was an adjunct professor for 13 years at Pratt and 2 years at Parsons Graduate Schools of Arts and Cultural Management where she created and taught “Cultural Pluralism” and “Arts and Education” courses. As an attorney she served as Senior and General Counsel at television networks MTV, NBC, BET Nickelodeon, CTW ( Sesame Place) and eventually in her own practice representing artists and arts organizations. She served on countless boards and advisory councils, and review panels such as ; Cool Culture Design Thinking Lab for New Audiences, ELNY Innovation Strategies for Arts Leadership; NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs, NY Foundation for the Arts; Curatorial Advisor to The National Public Housing Museum and NYU Italy’s Relational Aesthetics Art Initiative.

In Baltimore she served as Director of Station North Arts District. She served as curatorial advisor for The Contemporary, artists advisory member for The Maryland Film Festival, The Parkway Film Center and Guild for Future Architects. She was appointed as a Public Art Commissioner in Baltimore City under Baltimore’s Mayor Rawlings Blake. She served on the Mayor’s Task Force for Artist Housing and Task Force for Confederate Monuments under Baltimore’s Mayor Pugh.

Currently, her work is part of the “Taking Care” exhibition on view now at the Staten Island Museum at Snug Harbor. She is a cohort member of the collective Lalibela Baltimore with collaborators, Terence Nance, Tarana Burke, Shawn Peters, Bradford Young and 10 other artists who are the stewards of a converted 60K foot icehouse which they are restoring for use by the community for programming for healing, art making, film production. Lalibela Baltimore is an interdisciplinary project using creative industry as a cultural intervention into what the New York Times describes as “a city that operates as a laboratory for bold visions in exchange for social and economic precariousness.” It is a project that is both about occupying physical space and co-creating material opportunities for the communities surrounding that space to benefit and thrive and practice.

Photo by Schaun Champion