Imani Jacqueline Brown (b. 1988) is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans, based in London. Her work investigates the ‘continuum of extractivism’, which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production, gentrification, and police and corporate impunity. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that form the foundations of US society, she opens up space to imagine paths to ecological reparations.

Imani makes videos and installations, organizes public actions, delivers testimony to organs of the United Nations, occupies billboards, writes polemics, performs lectures, and uses counter-cartographic strategies to map the spatial logics that make geographies, unmake communities, and break Earth’s ecologies. Her work has been presented internationally, including in the US, the UK, Poland, Germany, and the UAE, most recently at the 12th Berlin Biennale. Among other things, she is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London, a research fellow with Forensic Architecture and an associate lecturer in MA Architecture at the Royal College of Arts.

Photo credit: Scott Eustis / Healthy Gulf. Flight courtesy of South Wings.