Derrick D'Von Woods-Morrow

What I Build, with others ———————————————————————————————————————————- Associate Professor Derrick Woods-Morrow (far left) leads a panel on Seeing and Unseeing during the ‘New Spaces symposium’ for the Inauguration of RISD President Crystal Williams.

ethnographic, photographic, sculptural, and sonic spaces that center Black queer desire, intimacy, and belonging.

Reimagining neglected and erased histories through film, installation, and embodied research.

Building alternative networks that blur the lines between artist, subject, and audience.

Transforming public and institutional spaces through familiar materials and sound.

Excavating stories silenced by history and re-inscribing them as portals, heirlooms, and ruins.

Deep listening, participation, and relational practices that honor opacity as well as visibility.

Staging immersive encounters where pleasure, survival, and activism converge.

Expanding boundaries between analog and digital archives, immersive audio, and speculative cinema.

Practices rooted in justice, refusal, and collective authorship within and beyond the classroom.

Research and creation across geographies of the Atlantic world—The Global South, U.S. South, and beyond.

World-Building Through Art Creation:

Archival Interventions:

Collaborative Practices:

Site-Specific Installations:

Cultural Memory Work:

Ethnographic & Community Engagement:

Performance & Experiential Programming:

Cross-Media Experimentation:

Equitable Pedagogy:

Global/Transhistorical Dialogue:

 

World-Building Is Portable - BRing me to a location near you - CLICK HERE


World-Building Is Expansive - here’s a list of additional offerings:

Speaking Engagements

With over a decade of experience as a maker, educator, and researcher, I regularly give talks, lead workshops, and participate in panels that examine the intersections of race, desire, material practice, and Black queer futurity.

I’ve spoken at museums, universities, and cultural institutions across the U.S. and abroad—addressing topics that range from experimental approaches to archiving and speculative worldbuilding, to the role of the creative technologist in shaping new forms of design. My lectures often traverse countercultural movements, the science of epigenetics, and Southern memory as a kind of landscape architecture—where history is not only remembered but embodied.

Whether in the classroom or a public forum, I approach each engagement as a space for (re)thinking with others—not as a static lecture, but as a live inquiry. I consider public engagement an extension of performance itself—an occasion for questioning, shifting, and reimagining together.

If you’re organizing a talk, symposium, or program and believe my work might resonate with your aims, I’m open to the conversation.

Studio Visits

Studio visits are one of the most meaningful parts of my practice. They offer a space to share the work mid-thought, mid-material, in the heat or quiet of becoming. I welcome artists, curators, students, and cultural workers into the studio not just to witness the process, but to be in conversation with it.

Over the past decade, my studio has held collaborative ethnographic work with LGBTQ migrants, field recordings that trace continental shifts, and objects made from salt, glass, and breath. It’s a space where research moves alongside making—where the archive might arrive through a whisper, a photograph, or a strand of horsehair. I approach these visits as a chance to listen, to learn, and to deepen the questions at the heart of my work.

Equally, I find studio visits with other artists and students to be vital. Those exchanges—quiet or fiery, structured or improvisational—have shaped the way I think, teach, and create. I’ve watched my students carry this ethic into the world, building practices of their own, exhibiting internationally, and continuing to move with care and clarity.

If you’re interested in scheduling a visit—or inviting me into your own space—I welcome the possibility when time, location, and shared intention align.

Commissions

I take on commissions when there’s room for dialogue, material specificity, and the kind of rigor that respects both process and place.

Over the past ten years, I’ve worked across photography, sculpture, performance, and installation—often blending them to explore site, memory, and intimacy. My commissioned works have ranged from public installations to private pieces held by collectors in a variety of mediums, curators, and arts professionals. I’ve developed proposals for large-scale works, responded to institutional RFPs, and created custom projects that meet the needs of both public context and private space.

Each commission begins with a conversation. I’m interested in what the site asks of us, what the materials want to say, and where the work might linger—physically or emotionally—long after it’s installed.

If you have a project in mind, I’m open to hearing more.