Jasmine Gabrielle Washington
Image Credit: Joshua Slowe, March 2025 at the James E. Hooper House in Baltimore, MD.
Biography
Jasmine Gabrielle Washington (b. 1996, Baltimore, MD) is an artist, curator, writer, researcher, and archivist living and working between Baltimore, Maryland and Virginia.
Her practice is composed of case studies drawn from lived and inherited field sites and is concerned with how care circulates: where it comes from, who has access to it, and how perception, memory, and language shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. Washington works across photography, film, sound, writing, archives, and exhibition-making, tracing how care, survival, and memory are carried across generations.
Shaped by personal and intergenerational experience, her work engages Black single motherhood, family archives, land, grief, inheritance and the politics of perception. Ongoing bodies of work include The Inheritance of Survival: What Survival Asks of the Children of Black Single Mothers and Remembering Forward, a long-term project in conversation with her family's land in Stony Creek, Virginia.
Washington approaches exhibitions as living architectures that gather and transmit knowledge. Through image and language, she creates environments that slow perception and honor complexity and relation. Her work often inhabits the unstable terrain between image and interpretation, asking what remains present even when it cannot be measured.
She is the founder of Use Your Voice (UYV), a curatorial and philanthropic infrastructure grounded in the belief that humankind benefits from humankind. Through care-centered cultural production, public programming, research, and resource-building, UYV supports people across difference and fosters opportunities for connection.
A devoted writer, Washington’s texts operate through reflection, inquiry, and excavation, attending to the emotional, social, and historical conditions that shape lived experience.
Washington is a recipient of the 2026 Fred Lazarus Award for Social Change and a 2026 Darryl Chappell Foundation Mentee under the mentorship of John Simmons. She serves as Guest Gallery Curator of Gormley Gallery at Notre Dame of Maryland University, where she has been reappointed through 2027. She is currently a France-Merrick Fellow and MFA candidate in Photography + Media & Society at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she studies under Bill Gaskins.
Across artistic, curatorial, and institutional practice, Washington remains committed to building structures that allow complexity to remain intact.
Artist Statement
My work and my experiences are inalienably mine.
I make work, I write, I research, and I’m not in a rush.
I operate as a cogitator.
My practice is composed of case studies drawn from lived and inherited field sites. Working across photography, film, installation, writing, sound, archives, and curatorial practice, I investigate how care circulates: where it comes from, who has access to it, and how memory, perception, and language shape our understanding of ourselves and one another.
We are conditioned to try to survive.
Not to survive, but to try to.
Not to live, but to try to survive.
Conditioned to navigate systems that were never designed with all of us in mind.
As a Black, Lesbian, and neurodivergent woman born and living in the United States, I understand visibility as unevenly distributed and autonomy as something many of us are taught is conditional.
I am not interested in making myself more legible for consumption. I am interested in altering the conditions that make translation feel necessary in the first place.
My practice offers me the opportunity to experience my own life.
To operate within an autonomy I was taught to believe I do not have, but I do and always will.
CV/Professional ExperienceThis file is formatted for and best viewed on a desktop.