Stephanie J. Williams
The Expectation of the Observed
March 16 - April 11, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 21st
CLICK HERE to Register
This experimental short considers the unrecognized labor in having and being a body. The puppets—disembodied meaty legs, flayed of skin—dance in repetition even as they start to disintegrate.
The Expectation of the Observed meditates on how much our bodies do not actually seem to belong to us. Marginalized bodies act as political symbols and perform for an expectant audience who is implicated in their watching. The dance, a satirical performance on a bare wooden stage, shows literal meat under duress trying to remain in rhythm only to be torn apart. Muscle and sinew break away and the surface disintegrates.
Over the past couple of years, Williams has been most drawn to work that requires care—an accumulation of small intimate gestures. Working frame by frame, the gesture(s) of puppets in pose create a collaborative ritual as I pace to and from the camera.
Stephanie J. Williams is a tinkerer and doodler. Her work navigates hierarchies of taste, unpacking the constructions of contemporary social coding.
She received her MFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design, 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, Delaware Contemporary, and the Walters Art Museum as a Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize Finalist, with residencies at The Nicholson Project, UCROSS, Sculpture Space, Williams College, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Artists’ Cooperative Residency & Exhibitions (ACRE).
Williams has been reviewed by the New York Times, Village Voice, Huffington Post, and the Washington Post.
Recent projects have screened at the Slamdance (2024), Ann Arbor Film Festival (2024), New Orleans Film Festival (Best Animated Short, 2022), Thomas Edison Film Festival/Black Maria (2023, 2024) and the Atlanta Film Festival (2023, 2024) with support from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund in Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University and multiple DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities Fellowships.
Williams is based in DC and Baltimore and currently teaches stop-motion animation in the Animation Department at Maryland Institute College of Art.