Shameekia Shantel Johnson is a writer, curator, and researcher of Afro-Caribbean ancestry from New York City. Working from the critical framework of social architecture, she considers the multidimensional relationship between people, politics, narrative, and environment.

Her curatorial contributions include black beyond: _assembly, alchemy, ascension (2022) at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Gallery of the New School; black beyond: _origins (2021) on New Art City; and The Complexity and Cost of Identity No. 1 (2021), staged at HOUSING. Johnson’s bylines include Sucking Salt and Revision’s Zine, Modeling Ecologies:Take Care, Art in America, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, SEEN Journal, Forgotten Lands, Hyperallergic, and Studio Museum Magazine; feature stories include It’s Nice That and Cult Classic.

Joining the FORGOTTEN LANDS team as Guest Editor of Volume 07, Johnson draws from June Jordan and Sylvia Wynter, among other influential Caribbean thinkers, to survey how postcolonial pedagogy can shape a design language that prioritizes humanitarian and ecological concerns. By transcribing folklore, Creole aesthetics, and notions of unruliness through speculative design and applied architecture, Volume 07 invites us all to explore how storytelling and physical practice can reshape the built environment and social imagination. FORGOTTEN LANDS: Volume 07 will debut in the Fall of 2025.

Currently, Johnson is perfecting her nomenclature, Red Notes, an ongoing body of work investigating Black people’s psycho-spiritual-affective relationship to the color red and its presence in social space. Through the lens of color theory and synesthesia, Red Notes examines the chromatic intensity of red—its ability to evoke desire and distress while noting the connective tissue between body, memory, and environment. Red Notes is an interdisciplinary experience tracing cultural movements and embodied phenomena, turning fragments into a (in)complete image of Black expression.

[Email] shameekiasjohnson@gmail.com

[Instagram] @shameekia.shameekia.shameekia

[Are.na] Abstract // Sha