Paula Damasceno is a transdisciplinary artist and professor of Media Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, whose practice weaves photography, performance, installation, and impure Afro-diasporic cosmologies into what she calls an “initiation poetics”—a space where knowing and not knowing, opacity and refusal, become generative forces. Her work engages material legacies such as tintypes, ritual objects, and embodied gestures to create speculative grounds for memory, exile, and new territories in confluence, across disciplines and histories.

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Her films—documentary, short fiction, and experimental—center memory as a living archive, braiding local stories with community records and speculative fabulation to surface what the official record withholds.