tHE podcast
where we look at comics and media with lots of questions in mind, mainly where the hell are all the black/brown people?
Hosted by Jamie Robertson and Marcelese Cooper
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jAMIE rOBERTSON
Jamie Robertson is a visual artist and educator from Houston, Texas. She earned a BA in Art and MFA in Studio Art from the University of Houston. She also holds an MS in Art Therapy from Florida State University. She is a former recipient of the American Art Therapy Association's Pearlie Roberson Award and Red Bull Arts Microgrant. In 2022, she was selected to participate in ACRE Residency in Wisconsin. Robertson is also one half of the podcast, Where I See Me, which examines the presence of Black and Brown people in comics and media.
Through the mediums of photography and video, Robertson’s creative practice takes root in the recollection of the African Diaspora's personal and collective histories. Her work was featured in FORECAST 2021: SF Camerawork’s Annual Survey Exhibition, Flatland Film Festival, Art League Houston, Florida A & M University Foster-Tanner Fine Arts Gallery, 516 Arts, and internationally at Contemporary Calgary in Exposure Photography Festival in Canada. Her photobook Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, TX was published in December 2020 with Fifth Wheel Press. She currently works as a Lecturer at Sam Houston State University.
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MarCELESE COOPER
Ever since they were a teenager, Marcelese Cooper found themselves without the words to fully capture what it is to be young, black, and queer in the U.S. at this moment. Their work captures the odd beauty of human connection. Their work explores the intersections of their own identity – dreams, science-fiction, the black/brown body, and storytelling. Cooper is a multi-disciplinary artist with a BA in Film Production, a BA in Digital storytelling, and an MFA in Photography and Digital Media; they use this expansive toolkit in storytelling and look to science-fiction, surreal art-house cinema, and poetry as the vehicles for their thoughts so that they may interrogate the subject of their flesh and soul uninterrupted.
Cooper's art practice is a metaphysical rain cycle of dreams and personal truths; these pieces change form but never truly lose their dark humor or message as they turn from medium to medium. Their work impacts the cannon of narrative storytelling by means of shouting their blackness, their queerness, their everything into the void of cosmic horror. Cooper commits themselves to the production and study of media, both through the podcast Where I See Me and various writings, as well as in the role of Assistant Professor of Digital Media Production at Gannon University. These all are avenues through which they aim to make sense of living in a black body and what it means to love, protect, and understand that body. Cooper believes they must make this work because they must live. For them, living is feeling, and if they must feel, then they will explore this human action through art or risk madness.
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