Biography
Shorthand Bio:
Kim M Reynolds is a writer and cultural worker whose practice spans criticism, scholarship, poetry, and organising. Rooted in Black feminist and queer thought, their work poetically interrogates the pitfalls of social justice on the continent of Africa and its diaspora in order to imagine freer, more livable futures. With master’s degrees from LSE and UCT, Kim’s research and writing move between media critique, political analysis, and arts interventions. Their writing has been published in the poetry anthology Woven with Brown Thread, alongside over 30 arts and politics bylines with the Mail & Guardian, VICE, and the Johannesburg Review of Books, and they have lectured widely. Lastly, she serves as a co-lead of the research and organising collective, Our Data Bodies, which examines how big tech and surveillance reproduce marginalisation.
Extended Bio:
Kim M Reynolds (she/they) is an arts and politics writer, critical media scholar, tech researcher, and cultural worker from Ohio in the US, based in Cape Town, South Africa whose work focuses on the narrative and critique of Black arts and politics.
Kim holds two master's degrees (MSc and MA) in Global Communications, Critical Media Analysis and Black and African film from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of Cape Town (UCT), both with distinction. At the LSE, she focused on discursive colonialism in popular culture and news as well as Black and African feminist studies. At UCT, she focused on Black queer theory, Black film, postcolonial theory, and photography as a liberatory tool in Black imagination.
Kim is currently a freelance writer and poet, guest lecturer on critical media analysis and histories of racialized violence, and is co-lead of the research and organizing collective Our Data Bodies, which examines how technology and big data reproduce racism and what community solutions emerge from that examination.
Kim has co-convened courses such as Racialised Trauma and Justice and Queering Citizenship at UCT as well as annually delivers a three-part Black feminist lecture series at the Creative Academy in Cape Town. She has also delivered guest lectures on extractivism in the arts at institutions like Columbia University as a part of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), and in 2022 served on a jury for graduate student presentations at GSAPP.
Their written work has appeared in New Frame, VICE, Mail & Guardian, Black Youth Project, Stevenson Gallery, SMAC Gallery, and Teen Vogue. Their poetry is part of the printed anthology, Woven With Brown Thread, which published the poetry of 25 Black poets, edited by Upile Chisala, supported by the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg. Kim’s poetry has also been exhibited in Vienna as a part of the Octopus Programme group exhibition in 2022. Their flash fiction has been published by OutWrite as a part of their annual queer literature festival in 2021. in 2024, Reynolds was chosen as one of 12 writers to participate in the Black Atlantic Writer Residency, hosted by the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD) in Accra, Ghana
Kim is primarily concerned with the relationship between antagonism and imagination and their generative relationship, and what that offers to Black people and those subjected to colonialism.
Illustration credit : Farhana Jacobs