Pamela Sneed Awarded Inaugural Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers

Adjunct Associate Professor Pamela Sneed has received the inaugural 2021 Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers. In recognition of the award’s recipient the award will henceforth be named The Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists & Organizers. 

Founded by Queer|Art’s Black LGBTQ+ Artists Group, the award highlights Black queer artists within the Mentorship community that uphold guiding principles and practices like intergenerational exchange, collective care, creative resilience, preservation of Black queer legacies, and an engagement with grassroots organizing within their creative practice and beyond. This year, judges included celebrated writers, artists, and performers, Maria Bauman, Felicita (Felli) Maynard, and Saeed Jones. The award is accompanied by a $10,000 cash prize, and the winner will be honored during the Queer|Art Annual Party, in conjunction with the Queer|Art Prize ceremony. 

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works and a chaplet, Gift by Belladonna. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She has appeared in Art Forum, The Huffington Post and Hyperallergic. In 2017, she was a Visiting Critic at Yale and Columbia University. She is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor in Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She is online faculty at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the MFA summer low-res program for 4 consecutive years. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, NYU and Pratt Universities, Smack Mellon Gallery, The High Line, Performa, Danspace, The Bessies, Performance Space, Joes Pub, The Public Theater, SMFA, Bryant Park, NYU, BRIC and was an artist-in-residence at Pratt University, Denniston Hill and Poet-Linc, Lincoln Center Education. She has toured internationally. She directed work at Lincoln Center Atrium. In November 2018, she delivered the closing keynote for Artist, Designers Citizens Conference/ a North American component of the Venice Biennale. Her collage work appeared in Avram Finklestein's FOUND at The Leslie Lohman Museum in 2017. She has created cover collage work for an issue of Sinister Wisdom, (2018) Legacies of Resistance, “Dump Trump.” She has received a Monica Hand scholarship for the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown. Her visual work was part of a two person show in July 2018, part of HBO’s program, The Studio. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni’s The 100 Best African American Poems. Her short story book Sweet Dreams was published by Belladonna in April 2018.