Jamal Batts

Jamal Batts, PhD is a curator, writer, and scholar. His dissertation project, Immoral Panics: Black Queer Aesthetics and the Construction of Risk, reflects on the relation between black queer contemporary art and the intricacies of sexual risk from the early HIV/AIDS crisis to the present. His writing appears in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibit Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, ASAP/J, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series. He is a 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, a Center for Curatorial Leadership Mellon Seminar Member, 2020 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and a ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives LGBTQ Research Fellow. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic who have organized four seasons of black experimental film screenings in the Bay Area and produced three edited collections of critical essays, poetry, and visual art. In 2019 he served as the SFMOMA Summer Curatorial Intern in Contemporary Art where he curated film screenings and conducted artist discussions for the exhibit SOFT POWER. He is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley's Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. 

Photo by Joseph Frantz