About Loren Cahill
I am an assistant professor at Smith College School for Social Work. I grew up in St. Louis, MO, where I was nurtured by a family of judges, lawyers, teachers, and social workers. I have carried the lessons learned from my family and community into my organizing, service, and research. I received my Ph.D. in critical social personality environmental psychology from the City University of New York, an M.S.W. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and a B.A. in Africana and educational studies from Wellesley College. I have also had the distinct privilege to collaborate with Black girl artists in Philadelphia, PA, organize with Black young mothers and survivors of sexual assault in Brooklyn, NY, and consult with African women leaders through the Gates Foundation in Nairobi, Kenya.
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I was appointed the inaugural Scholar-In-Residence at The Colored Girls Museum with which I have been producing zines, grant writing, blog posts and curating exhibits on Black Girlhood. I launched “Tar Beach: A Black Interior Design Studio” a digital popular education platform that provides community building, curriculum, and workshops for BIPOC scholars, activists, and artists to gather and create together. I also am co-creating a participatory action research lab, The Loveworks Lab, which studies how women of color and marginalized genders of color engage in art play and archiving to find somatic-sensory healing, as well as self and collective care. We are striving to not only write peer-reviewed articles about these studies but also to create an immersive physical installation on-site at The Colored Girls Museum.
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My professional training is in Participatory Action Research (Fine et al, 2003), Liberation Psychology (Braynt-Davis & Moore-Lobban, 2020), and Black Feminism (Taylor, 2017). I am actively seeking to create a body of research that chronicles people, places, and transformative movements. The heartbeat of my scholarship pulsates around producing theoretical and practical exploration of how histories, lives, and structures can be reimagined into radical interventions that advance justice.
My guiding research focus explores how self-expression and self-determination lead toward healing and wellness in Black people’s individual and collective lives. I am positively obsessed (Butler, 2011) with the relationship between Black interior world(s) and Black exterior world(s) - mental, social, political, racial, ecological, cultural, and economic processes/spatial patterns that constitute Black life (Quashie, 2012, Hawthrone & Lewis, 2023). I have traced in my research how Black people living under matrices of domination (Hill-Collins, 1990) still possess a steadfast commitment to defy systems of oppression to exercise their imaginations to self-express and self-determine. I have also found that the utility of our love (Moore, 2018) can be witnessed in our praxis of Black collectivism and in our culturally-centered processes (Turner, et al, 2022). I am particularly moved by our social-political and creative and creative-spiritual projects of freedom (Imhotep & Baker, 2019). The interventions living inside of Black activism, organizing, and art, provide the axis around which all of my scholarly pursuits rotate.
Artist Statement
Curator/Design Statement
I am a Black feminist, scholar-creative, and cultural worker/organizer. I gain inspiration from Black archives, books, media, bodies, minds, and hearts. My art practice has largely taken shape through my empirical/theoretical writing, creative nonfiction, audio collages, and zines.
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My creative questions orbit around the ideas of self-expression and self-determination of Black people not only in our worldbuilding practices but also in our freedom projects of love and imagination.
In my academic writing, I trace the gifts and struggles that grow out of Black activism and art. In my creative nonfiction, I use personal reflections to explore themes of wellness and healing. In my audio collages, I overlay disparate pictures, videos, and audio files to tell complex stories about art collectives. In my zines, I share back difficult concepts from books I have read in accessible ways through salient quotes, visualizations, and complementary design elements.
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I created my art to order my feelings and play in my imagination. The art has helped me make sense of the world, to survive, and has become my small offering back to the communities that I love. My vision for my future work is to expand my exploration of Black feminism by creating more public-facing writing in blogs/essays/pop-up books/poetry. I also want to spend more time in Black archives to quilt together new possibilities for mixed media through the production of digital/audio collages, zines, and short films.
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I want my art to provoke and provide not to be singularly focused on the white gaze. I want my work to be “Black alive and staring back at you.”
I think my work is connected through the craft of assemblage. Every Black woman I personally know and have studied has taken the best and worst that life has had to offer them and has made something beautiful with the scraps. I want to refine my technique to do this better and more boldly than I have attempted in the past. My ultimate vision for my creative practice is to create a manual and meditation for another Black feminist to ignite their dreams and imagination. I hope to make art that feels accessible enough for other Black women/girls to jump in and join the cipher of this work. I hope that it opens a portal up to other new worlds and cosmologies.
Sample Art Portfolio
I have always had an eye for flair. From a young age, I was daring with my fashion choices, and interior design sensibilities and always seemed to make connections between things that most folks would never see any overlap between. In that sense, I have been a casual curator for most of my life. I would say my pairings might feel overwhelming or inundating to some in the way my art takes over space but my goal is for the audience, patrons, and onlookers to invite them to see the beauty and complexities of both art and aesthetics embodied within the Black feminist experience. I am a cultural worker, curator, and community-based researcher whose work directly engages communities in ways rooted in the resistance, wisdom, and grace of Black women and girls.
My professional training is Black Feminism central in informing my curatorial and creative praxis. I have been privileged to be able to work at one of the largest repositories of African-American history in the country, The Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture. As a Digitization Fellow for the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean and the Schomburg, I co-curated a Spring 2020 exhibit, entitled Traveling While Black: A Century of Pleasure & Pain. The exhibit documented the pilgrimages and pleasures of the Great Migration of African Americans, beginning at the start of the twentieth century and highlighting the restrictions and resistances to travel in the Jim Crow South and the Jane Crow North. As a fellow, I identified, handled, and synthesized the selection of more than 200 artifacts for the exhibit from five different departments in the Schomburg, including Arts and Artifacts; Photographs and Prints; Research and Reference; Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books; and Moving Image and Recorded Sound. I also helped with the planning of a virtual version of the exhibit and, separately, created ten public programs that highlighted the works and lives of Black women, such as Claudia Jones and Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith. At the Colored Girls’ Museum, where I serve as their inaugural Scholar in Residence, I have gained qualitative skills in researching the history of the lives of Black women and girls in America. Since accepting the role, I have explored social interventions through art, convened community portraiture classes, and supported the community-led curation of the following exhibits: Psalms of Toni Morrison, First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Sit-A-Spell, and The Intermission. My first solo commissioned room, The Afrofuturism Speakeasy at TCGM will be on display Fall of 2024. My community-based curatorial praxis has made me well-versed in exploring and exhibiting Black feminism in a variety of formats, forums, and mediums.
More informally, I find a lot of joy in styling my family and friends. I also get very excited about small interior design projects. I begin with creating personalized mood boards and Pinterest based on their intake assignments and preliminary conversation(s). I then create budgets and buy products for folks’ homes and closets. I hope as I build my brand and popularity to continue to have more opportunities to turn folks on to indie Black and Brown designers and artisans. I also want to spend more time supporting people in creative placemaking for both residential/commercial spaces as well as providing styling/design consults for folks’ wardrobes. I also spend a ton of time in Canva making perfect slideshows, flyers, infographics, and zines. I find joy and catharsis in helping people to visualize words and ideas as well.
I want to become a sought-after curator/designer that the Black and brown communities can trust to do beautiful Black feminist storytelling with archives, books homes, fashion, and digital spaces/products. I aspire to create mini archival interactive installations for Black festivals, collectives, conferences, and community spaces,
"My Life in the Sunshine", Digital Collage
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The Colored Girls Museum, Audio Collage
My Latest Projects
Self Portrait
A collage that honors my ancestors, hometown, sacred purpose, and scholarly pursuits. I provide visual depictions of my experiences at Tar Beach, The Loveworks Lab, and The Colored Girls Museum. It is an archive of who I am and what I stand for.
Personal Statement Zine
A visual narrative that explores my research agenda, theoretical lenses, and definitions. I also explore and explain my published work, teaching, and service alongside my public-facing work, popular education, and creative work.
