About
Tamika Galanis is a Bahamian-American documentarian and multimedia visual artist, whose work considers the contentious relationship between historical documentary accounts of the Caribbean and lived experience. With current climate crises in mind, her work emphasizes the importance of archival futurities for cultural preservation and focuses on documenting aspects of Bahamian life not curated for tourist consumption. This work counters the widely held paradisiacal view of the Caribbean, which was established through a controlled, systematic, commodification of the Tropics and maintained by the historic archive.
Galanis’s practice is image-based, incorporating traditional documentary photography and film, short experimental films, new media abstractions of written, oral, and archival histories, along with a number of hybrid works including sculpture, collage, and installation.
Galanis’s work has been exhibited in The Bahamas, the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean with film screenings including the Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, The Bahamas International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BlackStar Film Festival, L.A. Film Forum, MOCA Los Angeles, Hong Gah Museum in Taipei, and the inaugural Smithsonian African American Film Festival.
Galanis earned her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. She is a former Jon B. Lovelace Fellow for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress; the inaugural Post-MFA Fellow of Documentary Arts at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; and, former Fellow of Film and Media Studies at Emory University.
Tamika currently splits her time between The Bahamas and Upstate New York where she is an Assistant Professor of Film at Syracuse University.
Galanis’s practice is image-based, incorporating traditional documentary photography and film, short experimental films, new media abstractions of written, oral, and archival histories, along with a number of hybrid works including sculpture, collage, and installation.
Galanis’s work has been exhibited in The Bahamas, the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean with film screenings including the Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, The Bahamas International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BlackStar Film Festival, L.A. Film Forum, MOCA Los Angeles, Hong Gah Museum in Taipei, and the inaugural Smithsonian African American Film Festival.
Galanis earned her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. She is a former Jon B. Lovelace Fellow for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress; the inaugural Post-MFA Fellow of Documentary Arts at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; and, former Fellow of Film and Media Studies at Emory University.
Tamika currently splits her time between The Bahamas and Upstate New York where she is an Assistant Professor of Film at Syracuse University.