MY JOURNEY
Sannii Crespina-Flores is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, writer, independent researcher, and community archivist whose work examines the body as a living archive. Working across photography, speculative fiction, oral history, archival research, and community-based practice, she investigates how memory and knowledge move through bodies, generations, landscapes, and cultural traditions—particularly when the historical record is incomplete, inaccessible, or silent.
Her research brings artistic inquiry into conversation with biology, inherited memory, and African diasporic knowledge systems, exploring concepts including mitochondrial DNA, microchimerism, epigenetics, and maternal transmission. Rather than treating absence in the archive as permission to invent, Crespina-Flores uses fiction, image-making, and embodied inquiry to consider what may be known, what may be carried, and what remains beyond our authority to claim.
Crespina-Flores’s interdisciplinary practice spans more than two decades of filmmaking, writing, photography, education, and community-based work. Her film work was selected and screened through the Short Film Corner at the 60th Cannes Film Festival in 2007, marking an early expansion of her practice beyond the United States. In 2015, her story idea centered on Do Remember Me, the international youth initiative she founded, was selected as a winner of the Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge. The resulting documentary, The World Is as Big or as Small as You Make It, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, world-premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. In 2018, a poem created by a Do Remember Me student was selected for the United Nations’ International Youth Day celebration.
These moments are part of a longer trajectory in Crespina-Flores’s practice: creating spaces in which people can document, interpret, and transmit their own experiences across geographic and generational boundaries. She has developed educational curricula for TED-Ed and National Geographic and has presented her artistic and research practice in academic, literary, cultural, and community spaces in the United States and internationally.
She is the founder of the LO/URE Project, a research-based artistic and community archiving practice that uses writing, photography, oral history, speculative inquiry, and collective study to explore personal and cultural memory. Through LO/URE, she has developed workshops, publications, archival tools, and international writing communities that invite participants to consider their bodies, family histories, and lived experiences as sources of knowledge while interrogating who creates archives, who controls them, who is granted access, and what that access authorizes.
Crespina-Flores is also the founder of the Un-InhibitedMuse Film Festival, Do Remember Me, and the Yram Collective. She is the author of Machetes Are Forged in Soft Rivers and founder and editor of YETUNDE: A Community Anthology.
Across her work, Crespina-Flores builds a connective practice between science, story, image, and community—asking not simply what the archive remembers, but who has the authority to remember, interpret, preserve, and carry it forward.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS & LITERARY WORK
2026 YETUNDE: A LO/URE Anthology - founder/editor and project creator; community anthology developed
through the LO/URE global writing collective.
2026 All Rivers Return Home - artist journal integrating writing, photography, embodied inquiry, and the
LO/URE research practice.
2025 LO/URE Writers Guide - writing and worldbuilding guide developed through the LO/URE Project.
2021 Machetes Are Forged in Soft Rivers - collection of short stories and poems; added to the Arizona State
University Library, 2025.
2022 Root Work Journal - contributor.
2020 "An Acceptable Sacrifice," Midnight & Indigo.
2020 50 in 50: Letters to Our Daughters - contributor.
2020 The Matriarch Project, Black Women's Blueprint.
2009 "Do Remember Me," Philadelphia Stories 7.
2005, 2008 Poetry Ink - chapbook contributor, Philadelphia.
FILM, PHOTOGRAPHY & HYBRID CREATIVE WORK
2025-2026 Moth3r Mask - research-based photography, writing, and participatory art project examining the
maternal body as a living archive through biology, inherited memory, and image-making; presented in
London and Boston.
2019 "Untitled 5," Black Female Photographers Annual Magazine.
2019 Sweetness, RestorationART / Billie Holiday Theatre, Brooklyn, NY.
2015 The World Is as Big or as Small as You Make It - Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge Story Idea
Winner; story centered on the Do Remember Me Project; credited camera person. Directed by Heidi
Ewing and Rachel Grady; world premiere, 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
2008 LiLi, Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia.
2008 Pau Pau, Termite TV, Philadelphia.
2007 Conversations with My Conscience - selected and screened through the Short Film Corner at the 60th
Cannes Film Festival, Cannes, France.
SELECTED ARTISTIC & RESEARCH PROJECTS
2024-present Founder & Director, LO/URE Project - research-based artistic and community archiving practice
integrating speculative fiction, oral history, photography, archival research, embodied inquiry, and
consent-centered methods. Outputs include workshops, writers and instructor guides, archive kit,
publications, international writing communities, and community archive work.
2021 Founder & Director, From Chitlins to Champagne, Philadelphia.
2019-present Founder & Conceptual Artist, Yram Collective - interdisciplinary arts collaborative.
2007-2018 Founder, Do Remember Me - international youth storytelling initiative connecting young people through writing, film, photography, and digital exchange; projects included Philadelphia, Lagos, and Paris.
2007-2011 Founder & Director, Un-InhibitedMuse Film Festival, Philadelphia.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS, PRESENTATIONS & TALKS
2026 "What the Body Remembers, What the Record Keeps," Narrating Lives Conference, University of Cyprus
/ online.
2025 Moth3r Mask presentation, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom.
2025 Moth3r Mask presentation, Boston University, Boston, MA.
2025 Presentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
2025 Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba, New York, NY.
2025 Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn, NY.
2024 Harriett's Bookshop, Philadelphia, PA.
2020 Noyes Museum of Art, Stockton University, NJ.
2018 RUSH Arts Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
2015 75º Oeste / 75º West, Medellín, Colombia.
2008 Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, PA.
FELLOWSHIPS & RESIDENCIES
2025 Artist Residency, Josephine's Bookshop, Paris, France.
2021 Justice for My Sister Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab.
2021 Barbara Neely Fellowship.
2021 Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Author Fellowship.
2015-2017 Artist residency / program collaboration, Philadelphia Latino Arts and Film Festival.
2015 Artist Residency, La Macina di San Cresci, Greve in Chianti / Florence, Italy.
2013-2016 The Village of Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia.
2011 Artist Residency, Hungarian Multicultural Center (AIR/HMC), Budapest, Hungary.
AWARDS, GRANTS & HONORS
2024 Philadelphia's Cultural Treasures Grant.
2021 Independence Public Media Foundation Award.
2021 Arts Connect International Ripple Award.
2020 Scribe Video Center / Independence Public Media grant support for preproduction research.
2020 @30AMP Grant.
2015 Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge - Story Idea Winner / Grand Prize.
2015 Sadsbury Friends Award.
2012 MoFilm / AT&T; Grant.
2009 Mind Media Independence Grant.
2008 Asian Arts Initiative Honorarium.
2007 Philadelphia Activity Fund Grant.
2006, 2018,2020 Leeway Foundation Art & Change Grants.
2001 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema - Honorable Mention.
2000, 2002 School District of Philadelphia Awards.
TEACHING, CURRICULUM & MENTORSHIP
2021-present Mentor, Justice for My Sister BIPOC Sci-Fi / speculative storytelling programs.
Selected Curriculum development for TED-Ed, National Geographic, and the Hip Hop Education Center.
Selected Creator and facilitator, LO/URE writing, photography, and community-archiving workshops in
Philadelphia, Paris, and online; global writing collective and community-based curricula.
Selected Educator and mentor, Do Remember Me - youth storytelling, film, photography, media arts, and
international exchange.
2013-2016 Teaching Artist, The Village of Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia.
2011-2013 Teaching Artist, Youth Empowerment Services, Philadelphia.
2010-2011 Master Mentor / Women's Center, Community College of Philadelphia.
1995-2014 Instructor, Philadelphia Department of Recreation.
PROFESSIONAL & CULTURAL SERVICE
2023 Juror, International Documentary Association Awards.
2023 Juror, Independence Public Media Foundation.
Former Board Chair, Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation.
SELECTED PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Current Writers Guild of America East - Indie Caucus.
Current Black Women Photographers.
Current The Toni Morrison Society.
EDUCATION & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
2015 University for Peace, San José, Costa Rica.
2013 Community Word Project - professional development.
1994-1995 Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia.
1985-1987 Drexel University, Philadelphia.
2022 Production Assistant Certification, Justice for My Sister.
2020 Seeing Through Photographs; What Is Contemporary Art?, Museum of Modern Art.
2019 Trauma-Informed Practice, Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation.
2016 Child Abuse Mandated Reporter, PA Family Support Alliance