Photo: Kelly Campbell
As a cultural analyst and content provider, Erika Dalya Muhammad is part of a new breed of media experts who encourage consumer innovation and place a premium on the packaging of progressive brands and lifestyles. Currently an Adjunct Instructor at New York University’s Department of Art & Public Policy, Muhammad has also taught classes on contemporary art, cinema, music, and emerging technologies at Yale University and The New School for Social Research.
Muhammad’s forthcoming book project, ELECTROCULTURES: Vanguard Documentary, Cut-and-Mix, and Futurist Diasporic Media, opens up a vast new terrain of inquiry that traces “electrocultures,” which is the under recognized lineages and hidden histories of artists of color who continue to reshape digital culture and ideas of race, gender, and multiculturalism as they converge in documentary, hip-hop, cut-and-mix, and futurist cultures. It is an expansive landscape that moves freely and expressively from new digital exhibition and performance spaces to virtual online worlds that touch and play with the tropes of current popular culture, reasserting again, for a new generation, the idea of visual media as a process rather than an object or product.
Additionally, in her role as Executive Director of the Mount Vernon Hip-Hop Arts Center, Muhammad is currently launching the first multimedia space dedicated to the global urban youth culture, which originated in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s. With the Arts Center, Muhammad is creating a replicable model that can be duplicated in any city - Miami, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles. The goal is to build a series of technologically advanced educational institutions that ignite economic recovery in urban communities and provide youth with resources that lead to professional experience. Muhammad’s Hip-Hop Arts Initiative has a unique interest in the employment of the arts as a catalyst for economic redevelopment. The Initiative’s main goal is to launch and formalize a multi-city effort to encourage the national implementation of a hip-hop arts workforce strategy for youth.
For the City of Mount Vernon, Muhammad also serves as First Deputy Commissioner/Director of Arts and Culture. In this role she collaborates with youth serving organizations, including nongovernmental associations, government agencies, private businesses, and education agencies to engage out-of-school and underserved youth in addressing the social service and economic development needs of their communities, while helping young people acquire the skills they need to create productive lives.
Muhammad curated the critically acclaimed nationally touring exhibition, Race in Digital Space, which originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) List Visual Arts Center and traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts. For Oxygen Television Network she has worked as a producer and on-air correspondent and has held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the American Museum of the Moving Image. Muhammad received her Ph.D. from New York University and undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago.
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Erika Dalya Muhammad |
Erika Dalya Muhammad |
Erika Dalya Muhammad |
Amitav Kaul |
Tana Hargest |
Symposium C6 runs concurrent with 