Naima Green is an artist, photographer, and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. Naima accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. She considers water as fluid and regenerative and presents a window into the relationship between pleasure and the complex experience of the ocean: beauty, leisure, buoyancy, and overwhelm. Oral and written histories and the archival material essential to uncovering these stories are critical to her process. By synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames photo-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.

Naima has exhibited at museums and galleries across the country and her artwork is in the collections of Barnard College Library, Flaten Art Museum, Fleet Library at RISD, the Getty Research Institute, and the CCS Hessel Museum of Art, among others. Naima earned her bachelor of arts degree from Barnard College, Columbia University, master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, and master’s in fine arts from Bard College.