Tamika Galanis

Biography

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 at the Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, Bahamas International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BlackStar Film Festival, Los Angeles Filmforum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Hong-Gah Museum in Taipei, and inaugural Smithsonian African American Film Festival.

Education

• M.F.A., Duke University
• B.A., Clayton State University