Jazsalyn

Jazsalyn, Lecturer in Undergraduate Studies
Webpage: http://jazsalyn.com/

Jazsalyn is an Afro-Carolinian artist and technologist developing Ancestral Intelligence (2020-present) as a framework for alternative AI: our earliest forms of knowledge systems, philosophies, and traditions passed down through generations within indigenous and diasporic communities. She experiments with video game engines to create emergent forms of video art. Working where speculative fiction and reality collide, she builds game environments and converts them into vast interactive landscapes to recover traces of ancestral data, memory, and heritage algorithms. Moving between digital and physical space, her work extends to installation, gameplay-as-performance, and long-term projects to explore cooperative futures for complex human-to-nonhuman knowledge systems. In addition to teaching at Yale School of Art, she has written curricula on African and Diaspora rituals as speculative technology at The New School. She also organizes Black Beyond, an experimental, artist-led curatorial project where she curates exhibitions and experiences to define alternate realities for (b)lackness. Jazsalyn is the recipient of the 2026 Inaugural Creative Capital State of the Art Prize. Her work has been supported by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Serpentine Arts Technologies, Pioneer Works, New Museum’s NEW INC, Onassis ONX, MTA Arts & Design, Creative Time, and more. She has lectured at institutions including Harvard University and has been featured in publications such as Contemporary And, Cultured Magazine, and The New Yorker. @jazsalyn