ABOUT

Joy Amina Garnett is an artist and writer from New York now living in Los Angeles. Her artwork explores media consumption and distinctions between documentary versus fine art image-making. Her creative writing engages memory and dislocation, archives, and alternative histories. She lives and writes in  Koreatown, Los Angeles with her husband, conceptual photographer Bill Jones.
Garnett’s work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum of American Art, FLAG Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Artists Space, Smack Mellon, White Columns, Center for Book Arts, New York Academy of Sciences, Milwaukee Art Museum, Bristol Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, Boston University Art Gallery, National Academy of Sciences, Wellcome Trust (London, UK), and the Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium). Her honors include the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, residencies at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Creative Commons Dubrovnik, and grants from United States Artists, Therese Ralston McCabe Connor Fund, Chipstone Foundation Milwaukee, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Wellcome Trust.
Garnett was awarded a writing fellowship at Yaddo to work on her family memoir, The Bee Kingdom, (Gaudy Boy 2026), an advance excerpt of which was Longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize for Creative Nonficton. The Bee Kingdom weaves together memories, travelogs, original research, and fragments of historical fiction to tell the story of her decades-long search for her late maternal grandfather, the influential 20th century Egyptian poet and beekeeper Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955). Excerpts from Garnett’s early drafts as well as her short stories and essays can be found in Harper’s, Rusted Radishes, ellipse: journal of translation, Nashville Review, Evergreen Review, Ping-Pong, Halfway Down the Stairs, Two Coats of Paint, Full Blede, The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books), and elsewhere.
…

Contact: joy.garnett [@] gmail.com