Pamela Sneed

Bio/CV: Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet, performer and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and Funeral Diva published by City Lights in Oct 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Art Net  and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award. Funeral Diva was recommended by The New York Times alongside Baraka Obama’s memoir. Additionally in 2021, She was a finalist for New York Theater Workshops Golden Harris Award and received a monetary award. In 2021, she was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’s More Life exhibit, and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, DIA, NYU’s Center For Humanities. She has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, The Academy of American Poets and more. Her visual work was featured in the group show Omniscient at Leslie Lohman Museum and currently has visual work in a group show at The Ford Foundation. She won the 2021 Black Queer Art Mentorship Award for her leadership and literary talent. She  participated as a reader in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and is a narrator for Coco Fusco’s film, also in the 2022 Whitney Biennial . She has had keynotes at Yale University, Georgetown University and Park Avenue Armory. She has won a BOFFO residency on Fire Island in August 2022.  She is an online professor in the SAIC low-res program. She has been a guest artist for 6 consecutive years. She also teaches poetry and art across disciplines in Columbia Universities MFA in Visual Arts program. She has won a 2023 Creative Capital Grant in Literature.

Artist Statement: Pamela Sneed is a Black queer interdisciplinary artist always working at and envisioning the intersections of poetry performance collage and watercolors. Her work is both personal and political, often rendering those felled by violence , or historically erased.  She works between portraiture and abstraction. With this particular show she pays homage to Black queer femme American blues singers who paved the way for Rock n Roll and all forms of Americana.

Social: @pamela_sneed