Elissa Blount Moorhead

Artist, Director, Writer, Founder/Principal of Seven Stories Productions

Elissa Blount Moorhead is an artist and director investigating the poetics of quotidian Black life.
Moorhead creates films, television programs, public art, time based and expanded multimedia
projects.Moorhead’s career has spanned over 35 years as an artist, instructor, advocate, and

programmer. Recent awards include the USA Artist Award, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fellowship,
Sundance Episodic Lab, Ford Foundation /Just Films Fellowship, Ruby Award, Creative Capital
Award, and the Baker Award Prize. Projects she has directed include; Jay Z’s short film 4:44,
Apologue for The Darkest Gods for PBS, an AR/film projection installation, As of A Now, and Back
and Song, a four channel film installation in collaboration with filmmaker Bradford Young. She
was a writer on the Apple TV series Lady in the Lake. She is the author of P is for Pussy, an
illustrated “children’s” book and is featured essayist in the anthology How We Fight White
Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance . She was a 2020 resident at Eyebeam and a
Sundance Episodic Lab participant and awarded the Comedy Central Award and the Women at
Sundance Adobe Fellowship for her series entitled fiftyTWO. She was a recent Bellagio
Rockefeller Resident in Bellagio Italy, VCCA in VA, Carmargo in Cassis France, and Art OMI- NY,
and a featured artist in Georgia State University’s “Liquid Blackness” study symposium. Her work
has been reviewed and featured in Black Cinema & Visual Culture, Art and Politics in the 21st
Century. By Artel Great, Ed Guerrero; My Paik Nam June, a book published by the National
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Doing It, Fluid: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the
Making of a Moving Image Arts Community by Michele Prettyman for Duke University Press’
Journal of Black Aesthetics.. Her work was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022.
Moorhead’s curatorial and advocacy work includes; co-founding Red Clay Arts in NYC where she
curated/produced over 20 exhibitions and multimedia projects including; Random Occurrences, a
multi- venue exhibition; Cat Calls (Street Harassment project) at St. Ann’s Warehouse and the NYC
Museum; Practicum, the inaugural experimental series at Brooklyn, BRIC; FunkGodJazzMedicine,
the multi-site project in partnership with NYC Creative Time; Art in Odd Places, an outdoor
performance and visual art installation; and Flux Festival, an installation of time based, visual and
performance work. She was VP of Programming and Exhibitions for the Weeksville Heritage
Center in Brooklyn , NY and served as Program Director for Rush Arts Gallery, NYC. She was an
adjunct professor for 13 years at Pratt and 2 years at Parsons Graduate Schools of Arts and
Cultural Management where she created and taught “Cultural Pluralism” and “Arts and Education”
courses. As an attorney she served as Senior and General Counsel at television networks MTV,
NBC, BET Nickelodeon, CTW ( Sesame Place) and eventually in her own practice representing
artists and arts organizations. She served on countless boards and advisory councils, and review
panels such as ; Cool Culture Design Thinking Lab for New Audiences, ELNY Innovation Strategies
for Arts Leadership; NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs, NY Foundation for the Arts; Curatorial Advisor
to The National Public Housing Museum and NYU Italy’s Relational Aesthetics Art Initiative.

In Baltimore she served as Director of Station North Arts District. She served as curatorial advisor
for The Contemporary, artists advisory member for The Maryland Film Festival, The Parkway Film
Center and Guild for Future Architects. She was appointed as a Public Art Commissioner in
Baltimore City under Baltimore’s Mayor Rawlings Blake. She served on the Mayor’s Task Force for
Artist Housing and Task Force for Confederate Monuments under Baltimore’s Mayor Pugh.
Currently, her work is part of the “Taking Care” exhibition on view now at the Staten Island
Museum at Snug Harbor. She is a founding member of the collective Lalibela Baltimore with
collaborators, Terence Nance, Tarana Burke, Shawn Peters, Bradford Young and 10 other artists
who are the stewards of a converted 60K foot icehouse which they are restoring for use by the
community for programming for healing, art making, film production. Lalibela Baltimore is an
interdisciplinary project using creative industry as a cultural intervention into what the New York
Times describes as “a city that operates as a laboratory for bold visions in exchange for social
and economic precariousness.” It is a project that is both about occupying physical space and
co-creating material opportunities for the communities surrounding that space to benefit and thrive
and practice.