Light Work is working with artist Tamika Galanis on the project By the Skin of Her Teeth, which explores a nearly lost but important chapter in local history: the story of Harriet Powell’s escape from enslavement. Part reenactment, part abstraction, Galanis’ film draws from the tiny, yet evocative archival remnants of her story, paying homage to Powell and the committed abolitionists who helped her on the road to freedom from downtown Syracuse to Ontario. 

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About the Artist

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Tamika Galanis is a Bahamian-American documentarian and multimedia visual artist whose work considers the relationship between historical documentary accounts and the extractive power relations they often obscure. Her work seeks to produce counter-archives that promote archival futurity and speculative interventions that allow us to encounter a past that has been systematically effaced.

Galanis’s work has been shown internationally, including at the Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, The Bahamas International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BlackStar Film Festival, L.A. Film Forum, MOCA Los Angeles, Hong Gah Museum in Taipei, and the inaugural Smithsonian African American Film Festival.

Galanis earned her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. She is a former Jon B. Lovelace Fellow for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress; the inaugural Post-MFA Fellow of Documentary Arts at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; and, former Fellow of Film and Media Studies at Emory University.

Galanis currently splits her time between The Bahamas and Upstate New York where she is an Assistant Professor of Film at Syracuse University.

Artist’s website: tamikagalanis.com

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This project is made possible through a New York State Council on the Arts Support for Artists Grant with the support of the office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.