Alliyah Allen
ACADEMIC BIO:
Alliyah Allen attended Rise Academy in Newark, NJ, before earning a Wight Foundation grant to attend The Solebury School in 2010. She graduated from Haverford College with a BA in Religion and Africana Studies and has previously worked at the Village of Arts & Humanities in Germantown, Philadelphia, at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, and Monument Lab research teams.
CURATORIAL BIO:
Alliyah Allen is the Program Coordinator for New Arts Justice at Express Newark, an Assistant Curator of Monument Lab, and the Co-Founder of LAND Collective. Allen focuses on the experiences, narratives, healing practices, and transformational image practices surrounding blackness, spirituality, and womanhood. Drawing inspiration from revolutionary artists, Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, Deborah Willis, Simone Leigh, and many more, Allen believes in capturing the beauty, essence, and light of her collaborators, which in turn becomes a radical act to rewrite singular narratives, reclaim power and thrive in liberation.
The LAND Collective is a group of cultural producers and artists based in Newark whose mission is to uplift marginalized voices through art and storytelling.
IN THE NEWS
Her work promoting the artistic resilience of Newark and its artists earned recognition in an article published in The New York Times.
PUBLICATION
For her first publication, LAND Collective joins together to address the central questions: what is our relationship to space and how do we define power? Rooted in Newark, the artists and storytellers, reflect on their own unique positions and relations to the city in order to offer insights into how we understand, see, and impact the land in which we occupy.