Farrah Rahaman

Farrah Rahaman is a Trinidadian scholar and cultural worker who makes use of ethnographic and multimodal methods to interrogate the relationship between our mediatized worlds and liberation practices. She follows through lines in anti-colonial and decolonial theory, Black feminist thought, film, performance, and cultural studies, where she situates herself within a constellation of Caribbean theorists and cultural workers who have carved out expansive modes of being and relating to our environments in the long story of life on earth, outside of the nation state, militarism, and empire.

As a cultural practitioner whose meaning-making processes is activated through a co-constitutive relationship of scholarship, organizing, curation, and filmmaking, Farrah’s interdisciplinary methodology centers women’s narratives, political and social imaginations, and visual culture. Farrah mobilizes multimodal, Digital Humanities approaches in Cultural and Film Studies to generate new possibilities within archival audiovisual collections. Employing a framework of multi-sited ethnography between two critical institutions: film archives (sites of preservation) and film festivals (sites of exhibition), Farrah’s work uses creative process and practice as its theoretical axis, informing both its methodologies and its resulting products.

Farrah was a part of the BlackStar Film Festival team for a decade, and has provided curatorial and research assistance on the exhibitions Assemblage, Lossless and Swarm: Terence Nance. She is currently producing a performance series and installation for BlackStar Projects with the artist Joiri Minaya. As the 2023 Curator-in-Residence at Express Newark she mounted the film and video exhibition Things We Do in the Dark: Cinematic Experiments in Kinship which featured thirty video works from artists who engage in experimental and collaborative approaches to contemporary filmmaking. She is the creator of a performance intensive study space dedicated to the life and legacy of Trinidadian communist and Notting Hill Carnival founder Claudia Jones. She has received awards from the Leeway Foundation, Independence Public Media Foundation, NextDoc, Wolf Humanities Center, and Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. Currently she is the Director of CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) at the University of Pennsylvania.

Farrah’s dissertation research explores how Caribbean women have created and transmitted meaning through time, looking at lineages of intellectual cultural production in oral, literary, performance and cinematic traditions. Principally, she is concerned with moving image storytelling through a Caribbean diasporic feminist lens, analyzing how film is an extension of the traditions which have sustained life and expression in the Caribbean throughout its history. This collaborative study of Caribbean women’s moving image work, resulting in a scholarly re-interpretation of British, Caribbean, and American history and the accompanying digital collection, demonstrates the possibilities of communication and cultural studies to remap these sites and serve as a disciplinary container for anti-colonial futurities in the ongoing worldmaking project. By combining these tools, the project connects Caribbean women’s media narratives to global histories, scholarly inquiry, and cross-cultural dialogue, creating an enduring resource for education, scholarship, and public engagement.