Baker Artist Portfolios

Pamela Woolford is an interdisciplinary artist, intertwining her work as a writer, immersive-media creator, filmmaker, and performer to create new and hybrid forms of narrative work about Black Americans and others whose joy, imagination, and inner life are under-explored in American media and popular art. She is the recipient of eleven Maryland State Arts Council Grants (including six Creativity Grants, an Independent Artist Award in literature, and an Individual Artist Award in screenwriting); five film-festival awards internationally; a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland; an aSHE Fund Micro-Grant, a GrubStreet Boston Writers of Color Literary Support Stipend, and a host of other honors. She has been recognized multiple times by the Baker Artist Awards, including finalist honors in both Literary Arts and Interdisciplinary Arts, a Baker Artist Award in Interdisciplinary Arts in 2021, and the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize in 2022.

Woolford has been a James Weldon Johnson Fellow in the Arts; the Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University; and an artist-in-residence at Bard College at Simon's Rock, The Last Resort Artist Retreat, Storyknife Writers Retreat, and NES Artist Residency, and has  been the recipient of an Official Citation from the Maryland House of Delegates. 

She created a site-specific installation, which included her narrative multimedia piece Antoine and Me, for display at the Baltimore Museum of Art during 2022 to 2023 in an exhibition voted one of the top 5 in the Baltimore area during the show's opening year by BmoreArt magazine. Her last film, Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, had a limited online release with a virtual premiere event attended by 1.5 thousand people.

Woolford has authored more than 100 memoir, fiction, profile, human-interest, poetry, and think pieces published in The Baltimore Sun, Poets & Writers Magazine, NAACP's Crisis Magazine, Harvard University’s Transition, and other publications. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist, and was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize, among other literary honors. Her writings have been selected for anthologies, translated into German, and widely cited.

Artist Statement

I have been writing about my own life and the lives of, most often, Black artists, families, and neighbors as a memoirist, profile writer, and fiction writer for more than thirty years. I often adapt the scripts for my performance and film work from these writings, which I continue to create today. These writings take varied forms, such as memoir-in-verse, an essay about a photograph, and a short story based on the tales my mother told me in childhood about her own life as a child.

In my performance, film, and immersive-media work, I center my own Black, womanly, middle-aged body or voice and utilize movement-based art, 3D animation, sound and voiceover experimentation, or other nontraditional approaches to convey intimate moments and memories and the relationship between memory and imagination. Much of my work is inspired by my curiosity about the unveiling of truth through memory.

My intent is to amplify Black people's histories, emotional range, and inner lives, increasing the depiction, understanding, and appreciation of quotidian human qualities of people like me whose feelings and inner thoughts are underexplored in both traditional and experimental art spaces. I work to offer us a place for communing, a place for seeing, hearing, and remembering ourselves in new ways that recall old memories, feelings, trials, and triumphs.

Other people (and empathy) are also here, welcome, and touched.

To find out more, visit pamelawoolford.com.