Visiting Artist Talk - Tiona McClodden

Tiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden's films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.
 

McClodden has exhibited and screened work at the Institute of Contemporary Art-Philadelphia, Project 4 Gallery in Washington, D.C., Vox Populi Gallery-Philadelphia, PA, Esther Klein Art Gallery - Philadelphia, PA, Art Toronto’s VERGE Video program, On The Ground Floor Gallery-L.A., Imperfect Gallery -Philadelphia, PA, @RAUMERWEITERUNGSHALLE in Berlin, MOMA PS1, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Kansai Queer Film Festival in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan; and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, among others in a range of international film festivals and film programs. In her most recent exhibition, Dreaming of Kin (2016) curated by Ladi’Sasha Jones at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, McClodden exhibited the full installation her personal and familial biography epic Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, Movement I – The Visions. In 2015, she created Af·fixing Ceremony: Four Movements For Essex, an online project commissioned by  Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, commemorating poet Essex Hemphill on the 20th anniversary of his death. Her 2008 film black./womyn received the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Philadelphia Qfest and has been screened at film festivals around the country. She has received commissions from the Requisite Movers dance company, Flyground Movers dance company, Leeway Foundation, The New York Women's Foundation & The Barnard Center for Research on Women, Spelman College, and many contemporary visual artists as an avid art documentarian.  
 

McClodden has been awarded the 2016 PEW Fellowship in the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. The 2016 Ossian Arts Research Fellowship under the Jain Family Institute in New York, NY, attended the 2016 Sommerakademie Zentrum Paul Klee as a nominated fellow, attended the 2015 Flaherty Film Seminar as a Philadelphia Fellow, been awarded the 2007 Leeway Foundation Art + Change Grant, the 2009 Leeway Transformation Award, the Philadelphia Film and Video Association Finishing fund grant for both Bumming Cigarettes (2014) and black./womyn (2009). She recently received a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant for her ICA-Philadelphia commission Af·fixing Ceremony: Four Movements For Essex. McClodden more recently one of six American artists selected by CFC Media Lab, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and JustFilms | Ford Foundation for the inaugural  OPEN IMMERSION: A VR CREATIVE DOC LAB that brought together diverse creators from both the US and Canada to learn about, explore and experiment with VR storytelling, in particular as a form they can use to draw attention to issues of inclusion, racial and social justice.

She has held residencies for Leeway Foundation Art + Technology as a Nextfab Studio resident, and a sound residency for Sanctuary at the Rotunda where she produced her first sound installation The Chills, and the 2016 Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Iowa City, IA. McClodden has also produced and directed experimental music video works for Sub Pop record label artists THEESatisfaction, Sony Records music artist Natalie Prass, and independent artists SassyBlack.

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