Biography
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.
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.
Shorthand Bio:
Kim M Reynolds is an arts and politics writer, critical media scholar, and tech researcher from Ohio in the US, based in Cape Town, and she is primarily concerned with the generative relationship between antagonism and imagination. Her work focuses on the narrative and critique of Black arts and politics, and their research antagonizes colonial scripts in media and popular imagery so as to image beyond a binary-meaning making system. Reynolds is currently a co-lead of the research and organising collective Our Data Bodies.
Illustration credit : Farhana Jacobs