Kelann Currie-Williams

Kelann Currie-Williams (they/she) is a writer, visual artist, and oral historian based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Kelann is a PhD student at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, working at the intersections of Visual Culture, History, Black Studies, and Cultural Studies. Their research focuses on the image-making and photographic preservation histories of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Canada from the late 19th to late 20th centuries, and the scenes of migration, homemaking, community-building, and political mobilization that those photographs depict. Over the last year, Kelann has presented an in-progress paper entitled “Archival Photographs, Oral Testimonies, and Ekphrastic poetry as Black method-making” at the Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives: Archivists and Artists in Dialogue conference, which was held at Toronto Metropolitan University; spoke on a roundtable discussion on “Black Memories and Resistance in Montreal: Arts, Oral History, and Archives”, as part of the first annual Black Symposium Noir: Black Radical Thought and Praxis in Montreal; and was interviewed by archivist and educator Melissa J. Nelson for her podcast Archives and Things, where they discussed the potential and function of poetry and poetic interpretation in the context of working with archival photographs and oral history testimonies. Kelann is a long-time student affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, an affiliate of the Access in the Making lab, and a member of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology’s Post Image cluster. Her critical work has appeared in academic journals such as Urban History Review, the Canadian Journal of History, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Philosophy of Photography.