Grant Williams-Yackel
Grant Williams-Yackel (he/him) is a doctoral student of Art History and artist studying the invention of the camera as a tool of modern identity formation. His research investigates the social, political, and psychic processes by which images of Black death have become commonplace. His project is an attempt to diagnose a general problem of modernity: the moral blindness induced by technologies of sight.
Prior to starting the art history program at Northwestern, Grant served as a research assistant to Sadie Barnette in the inaugural cohort of the Black Studies Collaboratory in Abolition Democracy at UC Berkeley. From 2022-2025 Grant worked as the Project Manager and Curator for the Oasis in the Diaspora, where he organized intergenerational gatherings around its collection of over 12,000 rare, signed and inscribed books. In 2024, Grant served as an artist-in-residence at Black (Space) Residency in San Francisco. Grant's writing has been published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has given presentations, panel discussions and lectures at Eternal Now, Et. Al. Books, UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
Grant holds a dual B.A. in Rhetoric and African American & African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His work is supported by the Mellon Cluster Fellowship in Critical Theory.