I am a Baltimore-based social practice artist, researcher, educator and afrofuturist. In my multidisciplinary art practice, I focus on material culture and social phenomena involving Black Muslims in the United States, and the role of Mundane Afrofuturism in Black folks’ daily lives. My work explores how Afrofuturism in practice can act as counter-memory and how the intricacies of language have affected Black people in the U.S. over time creating forms of counter-culture like Black newspapers and Rap/Hip-Hop.

Safiyah Cheatam is a multidisciplinary artist, avid Afrofuturist and maintains a conceptual art practice based in research and storytelling of Black Islam. She has dedicated a decade toward arts education in Baltimore City, wherein she is currently the Assistant Manager of Teen Programs at the Walters Art Museum. Cheatam has led arts programming at the Baltimore Museum of Art, SNF Parkway Theater, University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) & Baltimore County (UMBC), and Wide Angle Youth Media. In 2020, she was a curatorial Research Assistant at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture for the special exhibition Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures.

Cheatam is a recipient of Washington Project for the Arts/Andy Warhol Foundations’ 2023 & 2022 Wherewithal Research and Project Grants, Waller Gallery’s 2023 Studio Fellowship (Baltimore, MD), VisArts’ 2021 Fleur and Charles Bresler Residency (Rockville, MD), Red Bull Arts 2019 August Microgrant, and Robert W. Deutsch Foundation’s 2019 Rubys Artist Grant.

She has been featured in The Washington Post, NBC News, BmoreArt, and has exhibited works and/or spoken at the Smithsonian’s 2022 Claiming Space Symposium, John Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Media at Risk, The Peale (Baltimore, MD), VisArts (Rockville, MD), Black Muslim Psychology Conference, Media Democracy Fund, New Media Caucus’ 2019 Border Control Symposium (Ann Arbor, MI), and the Coalition of Master's Scholars on Material Culture amongst other engagements.

Cheatam holds a MFA in Intermedia and Digital Art from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a BS in Electronic Media and Film from Towson University, co-founded the Islam & Print studio fellowship, and serves on the board of Baltimore’s philanthropic Awesome Foundation.


Reach me at safiyahcheatam@gmail.com

Selected CV