Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, film, poetry
Website: chanellstone.com
Chanell Stone was born in 1992 in Los Angeles, California, and lives and works in Oakland. She earned her BFA in Photography from the California College of the Arts in 2019 and her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Photography at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, KADIST San Francisco and Paris, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She has been listed among W Magazine's "8 Young Photographers to Follow" and received a New York Times Year in Review Photo Award (2021), a Black Studies Project Research Grant (2022), a Daylight Photo Award Juror Pick (2025), and an Honorable Mention at the Hariban Award in Kyoto (2024). Her debut solo exhibition Natura Negra was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco in 2019–20, and she was a shortlisted finalist for the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award.
Stone's practice — working primarily in black and white analogue photography, but also film, collage, and poetry — explores Blackness as both subject and medium, weaving together personal histories with broader narratives of the African diaspora. Central to the work is the re-naturing of the Black body in the American landscape: through environmental self-portraiture and large-scale landscape photography, Stone places Black bodies within the natural world to challenge the erasure of Black American connections to land, ecology, and ancestral geography. Her most recent body of work, Undulation of a Rupture, was made during a journey through the Mississippi Delta, retracing her own ancestry and reckoning with the river's role in the transatlantic slave trade. The monochromatic, large-scale photographs draw viewers into an encounter with water that is simultaneously opaque, forceful, and alive.
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