Kyandra and Shakiya

Endia Beal is an artist, curator, and educator based in North Carolina, who centers much of her work on creating visual narratives inspired by her personal experience and concerns for social justice. Beal received her MA in Photography from Yale School of Art—the only Black person in her class—and, while working part-time to put herself through school, produced her first videos examining the uneven power dynamics and uncomfortable experiences of women of color in corporate settings. Until recently, employed as a professor of art at an HBCU in Winston-Salem, she gives voice to her female subjects (many of whom were her students) as they question the need to change their names or conform to gender norms in order to succeed. In a recent photo series, “Am I What You’re Looking For?” Beal presents striking tableaux of proud young women in interview outfits set off against a printed backdrop of a white-collar office space that she implies was not designed with them in mind in the first place. Whether tackling the issue of inappropriate questions broached during mock interviews, or creating formal headshots of white middle-aged women whose hair has been arranged into styles most often associated with Black women, the breadth of Beal’s work greatly expands narrow definitions of gender, race, and identity within our culture.