Raven Moffett

Raven Moffett (they/them), co-editor, is an artist and art educator working on unceded Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui land in Tucson, AZ, with their partner and three canine companions: Odin, Jasper Shash, and Iinniiwaa. Raven is currently pursuing a PhD in American Indian Studies with a focus in Indigenous storytelling and interspecies reciprocal recognition across mixed media. Raven graduated with an MFA in Studio Art focused on lens-based media (photography and video) from the University of Arizona. 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.

Raven’s work is concerned with the politics of representation 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 mixed white settler (Scottish) and Native (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 embodied knowledge, feminist and queer theory, decolonial theory, Indigenous knowledge ways, and traumatic healing through creative acts, relationality, and storytelling.