jina valentine is a mother, visual artist, and educator. Her practice is informed by traditional craft techniques and interweaves histories latent within found texts, objects, narratives, and spaces. valentine’s work involves language translation, mining content from material and digital archives, and experimental strategies for humanizing data-visualization. She is also co-founder of Black Lunch Table, an oral-history archiving project.
Her work has received recognition and support from the Graham Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Art Matters among others. valentine received her B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon and her M.F.A. from Stanford University. They are a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
At MacDowell, valentine completed a final draft of her "Surplus Text" essay (edited by Mira Dayal) to be included in an anthology published through Princeton University (edited by Graham Burnett and Julian Chehirian). They also continued work on a series of drawings called Latency: Ghost Districts, which are illustrations of proposed congressional districts that have been struck down in court.
