The Film and Media Department is delighted to welcome one of this year’s Emory Arts Fellows, Tamika Galanis.
Galanis is a documentarian and multimedia visual artist. A Bahamian native, her work examines the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns. Emphasizing the importance of Bahamian cultural identity for cultural preservation, Tamika documents aspects of Bahamian life not curated for tourist consumption to intervene in the historical archive. This work counters the widely held paradisiacal view of the Caribbean, the origins of which arose post-emancipation through a controlled, systematic visual framing and commodification of the tropics.
Tamika’s photography-based-practice includes traditional documentary work and new media abstractions of written, oral, and archival histories. She will teach two Film and Media classes. her Fall course, FILM 285: Carving Out Space for Us will introduce students to experimental cinema, with particular focus on filmmakers of color.
Each of Emory’s fellows teaches undergraduate classes in arts programs, and part of the program’s intent is to expand the number of arts courses Emory can offer. It also gives the fellows university teaching experiences and opportunities to mentor future working artists.