Rashaad Newsome’s work blends several practices, including collage, sculpture, film & video, animation, photography, music, writing, computer programming, software engineering, community organizing, and performance, to create a divergent field that mirrors the intersectionality of his lived experience. Using the diasporic traditions of improvisation, he pulls from the world of advertising, the internet, art history, and Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that shifts between social practice and abstraction. Collage acts as a conceptual and technical method to construct a new visual, performance, sonic, machine learning, and literary language that highlights the immaterial and material expressivity related to Black American life. Newsome holds a 2023 honorary Doctoral degree in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut and a 2001 BFA in Art History from Tulane University. In 2005, he studied MAX/MSP Programming at Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center.

Newsome has been exhibited, collected, and performed globally, including at The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), The Museum of the African Diaspora (SF), The Whitney Museum (NYC), MoMAPS1 (NYC), The Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall (NYC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), New Orleans Museum of Art (LA), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Hayward Gallery (London), CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo (Spain), and The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow).

Rashaad’s many honors and awards for his work include 2023 ITVS Documentary Film Funding; 2022 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award For Computer Animation; The 2022 NEWFEST Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award; 2022 Bessie Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator and Outstanding Visual Design; 2022 Berkeley FILM Foundation grant; 2021, Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship; 2020/2022, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence artist residency; 2020 Eyebeam Rapid Response Fellowship; and 2019, LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant.