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Raven Moffett (they/them) is an artist and art educator working in the hills that tumble down to the Columbia River on the territories of Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Stl’pulmsh, Multnomah, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and Confederated Tribes of Stiletz Indians, with their partner and three canine companions: Odin, Jasper Shash, and Iinniiwaa. Raven is currently pursuing an PhD in American Indian Studies with a focus on Indigenous storytelling across mixed media. Raven graduated with an MFA in Studio Art focused on lens-based media (photography and video) from the University of Arizona, on unceded Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui land in Tucson, AZ. Raven received their BA in Art and Visual Culture with a studio art emphasis and an anthropology minor from Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, on Eastern Band of Cherokee territory. Their work has been exhibited in several shows in Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They have been published in local publications in Boone and Atlanta along with national and international collections. 

Photo by Anna Brody at https://www.annabrody.net/

Statement:

Raven’s work is concerned with the politics of representation, display, and museum ethics along with the influence that visual culture and language have on individual and cultural constructions of reality. Raven is dedicated to horizontal (non-hierarchical) experiential pedagogy and centers multivocality, collaboration, and community-based learning in their education and artistic praxis. 

Framing their process as a multi-modal storytelling, Raven’s work questions and subverts myriad dominant narratives including archives and their structures in an effort to open possibilities for multivocality and layered, embodied knowledge-ways while engaging in the critique of singular notions of finite truth. Raven’s process engages performative retellings of past personal and community experiences by borrowing appropriated cellphone and news footage along with mining personal and global internet archives of imagery. Their work problematizes notions of home and identity as they work through personal and cultural hi/stories and explore the liminal space they occupy as a queer, white-skinned, fem-bodied person of white (scotch-irish) settler and unenrolled ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ (Blackfeet) descent. Their use of lens-based media engages the problematic history of these tools as weapons of both oppression and resistance. Their personal praxis is grounded and informed by post-humanist theory, decolonial theory, Indigenous knowledge ways, and traumatic healing through creative acts, ceremony, and storytelling.