Iman Person is a first-generation Jamaican-American artist and cultural anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of Black and Indigenous technologies, and their connections to ritual, the land, language, and cosmic time. Her work goes beyond traditional Western views of technology to offer a somatic examination of cultural diasporas within the Americas and the Caribbean. In her practice, she sees the body as deeply connected to the elements, with her recent works focusing on air and ether as points of convergence for exploring collective histories, migration, and diasporic memory. Using Africana cosmologies and personal experience, Iman channels speculative visions of Black futurity through intuitive writing, video, real-time data, experimental sound, sensory ethnography, and object-making to shape unexplored ideas concerning living archives and sovereignty while navigating the delicate terrain occurring at the edges of multiple worlds.
Iman is currently an Associate Professor at Santa Monica College and teaches ceramics and New Genres. In 2022, Iman Person earned a master's degree from the Design|Media Arts program at UCLA. Recently, she was featured in Italian Vogue for her participation as an MBQMQB Artist in Residence at Villa Lena, Tuscany, Italy. In 2021, she won the STRP ACT Award for Creative Technology for her project New Air (2021). Her work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe, including the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, the 2021 STRP Festival in Eindhoven, Netherlands, the 2020 Ars Electronica Festival, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Ionion Center for Art in Kefalonia, Greece, and SoMA Art House in Berlin, Germany.