Kennedi Carter
Kennedi Carter is a photographer and visual artist based in the American South whose work examines Black cultural memory, identity, spirituality, and relationships to place. Through portraiture and landscape, Carter explores how histories of migration, resistance, and community are carried through the body and embedded within the environments people inhabit.
With the awarded film, Carter will continue developing The Water Bring We, The Water Wanna Take We Back, an ongoing photographic project centered on the Gullah Geechee corridor of the southeastern United States. The work investigates the enduring cultural, spiritual, and ecological traditions of Gullah-Geechee communities, tracing the ways African memory persists through language, ritual, landscape, and everyday life.
Taking its title from a Gullah-Geechee proverb, the project considers water as both a site of rupture and return—referencing the histories of transatlantic displacement that shaped the region while also acknowledging water as a conduit for ancestral connection and spiritual continuity. Through photographs made across the Low Country, Carter seeks to create a visual narrative that explores how Gullah-Geechee communities sustain cultural knowledge amid ongoing challenges, including climate change, development, and cultural erasure.
The awarded film will support continued travel, research, and image-making throughout the region, allowing Carter to deepen relationships with community members and expand the project's exploration of the connections between memory, landscape, spirituality, and Black life in the Low Country.
