Stephanie J. Williams

Stephanie J. Williams is a tinkerer and doodler. Her work primarily navigates hierarchies of taste, unpacking how “official” histories are constructed in order to understand contemporary social coding and the world around us. She received her MFA in Sculpture from RISD, has shown in Fictions, part of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s F-show exhibitions, as well as with Washington Project for the Arts, Lawrence University, the Delaware Contemporary, and the Walters Museum as a Sondheim Finalist, with residencies at Sculpture Space, Williams College, the Corporation of Yaddo, VCCA, and ACRE. Recent projects have screened at the New Orleans Film Festival (Best Animated Short, 2022), Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival (Jury Citation, 2022), and the Atlanta Film Festival (2023) with support from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund in Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University and multiple DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities Fellowships. She is based in DC/Baltimore and currently teaches stop motion for Maryland Institute College of Art.

HOSPES, 2022

Stop Motion (color, sound)
11:50 min

I feel like a stranger in my own home when I’m asked “What are you?”; called “racially ambiguous”. They demand that I name my meat, clarify my race so that they know how to treat me. Hospes is a short experimental puppet stop motion that asks, how do you stay whole within a society that wants to deconstruct you? Performing a choreography of resistance, scaffolded body pieces try to remain whole in an environment programmed to disassemble them.

Hospes is the Greek root of the word “hospitality”, “host”, “guest” and “stranger”. The duality of this word’s meaning echoes the subtexts associated with words we use to identify ourselves. In Hospes, a body is illustrated not through words, but as a collection of meaty performing pieces.

I am often told that I appear “racially ambiguous” and asked “What are you?”, a question that demands that I name my meat, the thing that is most visibly me. This clarification of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. identifies who I am and the contexts that those identifier words are associated with. Black. Asian. Queer. Female. Ultimately, this tells them how to treat me.

Hospes is a 12-minute puppet stop motion that expands the definitions of being as intersectional, multi-layered, transitional, and resistant against a social code based on categorization, for example, “black women look or behave like …this or that”.

It features a patchwork of unnamable body pieces, “performers” that are stitched and tucked together with remnant material. Flayed from their containment of skin, protuberances bouncing, puppeted rigs fully visible, these autonomous meaty performers are individually scaffolded but can also move in a way that affects each other, in congress, like a school of fish.

These performers first appear in a low-lit unconfined space that gradually reveals itself as a corridor of doors. The animation portrays a choreography of resistance by these scaffolded meaty bits, battling to remain wholly together against the seductive advances of the chorus of opening and closing doors intent on separating and sorting their pieces.

LINGERING SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT – single channel, 2019

Stop Motion (color, sound)
8:40 min

The first four minutes of black video include excerpts from a series of interviews with Williams’ mother about the greater United States, the US mainland, and the precarious nature that it has held with its territories. The animation focuses on the Philippines' absence from American history textbooks, presenting the perception of nationhood and self-identity formed from unlearned and fragmented contexts.

The protagonists are balut (Filipino fertilized and fermented duck eggs), literal hybrids, half-formed between states of matter akin to the civil rights of many US colonies past and present. Here, the balut is animated on a spinning kitchen table, a kind of theatrical stage, through a series of walk sequences until the puppets mechanically break down over the time in which they are animated.

This piece contemplates forced migration stories, using an accumulation of repeated gestures of labor. It’s inspired in part by Williams’ grandfather’s capture in the Bataan Death March during WWII and many forced migration stories unlearned and omitted that influence our perceptions of American history.

Americans eat duck, Americans eat duck eggs, but the thing as in-between makes it distasteful.