Hunter Ashleigh Shackelford
Hunter Shackelford (they) is a Black multidisciplinary artist, death worker, bioethicist, and cultural writer. Published in Teen Vogue, Wear Your Voice, Washington Post, For Harriet, Buzzfeed, and Huffington Post, Hunter is an established cultural essayist who uses ethnography, critical feminist thought, and death to illustrate the antiblack world and the experiences within it.
Hunter uses research, writing, and mixed-media painting to illustrate cultural stories of Black people across the diaspora. They are known for using incendiary motifs of Blackness, gender, fatness, and death. Hunter’s work centers the politics of Black insurgency, Black mortality, Black feminist ethics, and ugliness.
Hunter is also a reproductive justice strategist working at the intersections of race, transness, and reproductive access. In 2023, they were awarded the Virginia Public Humanities Fellowship to present their first solo art exhibition, Afrolantica (Virginia’s Fugitive Legacies).
