Welcome back beautiful people! On this week's episode, I am deeply honored to be joined by the incredible artist and filmmaker Allison Janae Hamilton!
Allison Janae Hamilton is an artist and filmmaker whose newest short film, Venus of Ossabaw, premiered this March at Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center in Savannah. Allison is widely known for her immersive, land-centered practice that treats landscape not as backdrop, but as a central protagonist shaped by memory, labor, myth and climate. Across sculpture, photography and multi-channel film, her work traces the social and environmental histories embedded in the American South, particularly as they relate to Black life and womanhood. Her visual language is informed by her powerful ability to weave ancestral narratives with urgent contemporary questions of climate and justice. Venus of Ossabaw marks a significant evolution in Hamilton’s practice. The newly commissioned film centers on the history of marronage—the formation of self-sustaining communities by people who escaped enslavement—through the fictional figure of Venus, who journeys across Ossabaw Island and neighboring Sea Islands off the Georgia coast.