VITAE

Joy Amina Garnett is an artist and writer from New York now living in Los Angeles. Her paintings explore media consumption and distinctions between documentary versus fine art image-making. Her creative writing engages memory and dislocation, archives, and alternative histories.

Education: Garnett recieved a BA in Humanities from McGill University, where she first started studying literary Arabic. She studied colloquial Arabic at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo. She studied painting at L’École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-arts in Paris, returning to New York to complete her MFA at City College.

Fellowships & awards: In 2024, Joy was awarded a writing fellowship at Yaddo to work on her family memoir, The Bee Kingdom (Gaudy Boy 2026), an excerpt of which was Longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize in Creative Nonfiction. 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, London, UK.

Creative writing: The Bee Kingdom weaves together archival materials, memories, travelogs, research, and fragments of imagined histories while following the author’s search for her late maternal grandfather, the influential Egyptian poet and beekeeper Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955). Excerpts of this work-in-progress, as well as other writings, have appeared in Rusted Radishes, ellipse: journal of translation, Nashville Review, Evergreen Review, Ping-Pong, Halfway Down the Stairs, Two Coats of Paint, and Full Blede.

Archives: Drawing on a trove of visually rich materials left behind by her Egyptian grandfather, Joy initially developed The Bee Kingdom as an interdisciplinary art project, now documented at thebeekingdom.art. She has been interviewed about her projects in ArabLit Quarterly, Hyperallergic, and 3Quarks Daily, and her essays have appeared in Arab Urbanism Magazine, Ibraaz, Bee World, and Baraza. 

Editing: Garnett serves as Art Director of the Evergreen Review (since 2019). In addition, she directs the art aspect of SUSPECT, the journal of Singapore Unbound that publishes contemporary art and literature from the SWANA region. From 2005-2016 she was the Art Editor of Cultural Politics, a media theory journal published by Duke University Press. While serving as a board member of Visual AIDS, Garnett launched and edited its first blog and electonic newsletter. In the late 1990s, she created and edited the online entity NEWSgrist.

Art writing and scholarship: Joy has contributed chapters to several books, including Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World: Arts, Thought, and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020); The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, 2016); Virilio and Visual Culture, and The Virilio Dictionary (both published by Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies (Polity, 2011). She penned the column “Into Africa” (1999-2001) on the arts of Africa, for artnet magazine, while working at the Robert Goldwater Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. She has written about painting’s relationship to photography and new media, most notoriously in Harper’s, as well as in Intelligent Agent, Journal of Visual Culture, and in her column for Art21 Magazine. Her essays on this subject can be found in books and exhibition catalogs, notably Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network edited by Jordan Crandall and Amy Scholder (Eyebeam/DAP, 2001); Under Fire: The Organization and Representation of Violence edited by Jordan Crandall (Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2 vols. 2004; 2005); Vertov From V to A, edited by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn (Ediciones la Calavera, 2008); Myself: A Conversation about Self-Portraiture, a conversation with Mira Schor (University of Nevada Reno, 2011); M/E/A/N/I/N/G (25th Anniversary Issue) edited by Mira Schor and Susan Bee (University of Pennsylvania and Duke University Press, 2011).

Exhibitions: Garnett’s first solo exhibition of paintings was held in 1999 at Debs & Co. in New York City’s Chelsea district. Her 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 (all in New York), Milwaukee Art Museum, Bristol Art Museum, Roger Williams University, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, Boston University Art Gallery, Savannah College of Art & Design, Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University, Illinois State University Galleries, Smithsonian traveling exhibitions, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Wellcome Trust (London, UK), and the Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium).

Collections: Garnett’s paintings are held in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Altria Group (Richmond, VA), West Collection (Oaks, PA), and in numerous private collections.

Press: Garnett’s paintings have been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, New York Magazine, Harper’s, Perspecta: Yale School of Architecture Journal, Time Out NY, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, artnet, Hyperallergic, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Stranger, Musée Magazine, The Huffington Post, WIRED, Cabinet Magazine, C Magazine, New American Paintings, and Bidoun.

Contact: joy.garnett [@] gmail.com