About

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a visual artist, scholar, composer, and curator. Her practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the trauma of the past. Through her visual, sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. Above all, she is interested in redistributing the privileges that allow her to maintain her creative and scholarly practice.

She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, India, New York City and Providence. She has curated exhibitions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Artist Proof Studio and the ABSA Art Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; RISD Museum; and Brown University Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, where she was also a Public History of Slavery Fellow. 

As the 2019 inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health she utilized the arts to confront health disparities. She was the 2020 Artist Fellow at the RISD Museum making work in response to the collection. As a 2022 Fitt Artist-in-Residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, she created Not Never More a visual remix of the historic wallpaper Les Vues D’amérique Du Nord. At the 150th Anniversary of the Colfax Massacre she designed the Colfax Massacre Memorial—etched in granite, it honors and centers the stories of the Black victims of the tragedy. She is the illustrator of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, adapted for young readers by Ibram X Kendi.

Jazzmen is currently working on a series called Contraband, which focuses on how the industry of slavery laid the blueprint for drug crimes, illicit economies, substance use disorder, and mass incarceration in Black communities in Baltimore, based on her research as artist fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. 

You can find her work in public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, RISD Museum, Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College, Mt Holyoke College Art Museum, the Joshua Hempsted House Museum and many others.