BIO

René Sing Brooks, born in Bluefields, Nicaragua, is a writer, photographer, and videographer. He arrived in the United States in 1992, invited by SUNY Buffalo to participate in a one-year Oral History Program. He has overstayed his welcome.

From 1993 to 1995, Sing Brooks worked for the Coalition for Economic Survival, a prestigious Los Angeles-based tenant rights organization. In 2002, he joined the NY-based Fortune Society’s Education Program as the coordinator of its computer literacy initiative. Seven years into a fourteen-year tenure, Sing Brooks developed and taught a Multimedia Workshop that served over 140 participants.

René Sing-Brooks has written for OpenStax at Rice University in Texas, AM NEW YORK, Bronx Times, and the Pulitzer Center. He is a 2020 Pulitzer Center fellow, a Wagner Archives alumnus, a graduate of New York's LaGuardia Community College Photography Program, and a participant in the Lewis Latimer House Museum 2023 “Writing on Race & Immigration” workshop.

 Sing Brooks lives in Jackson Heights, New York.

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a writer, photographer, and videographer born in Nicaragua, with roots extending to Rama, Miskito, Mestizo, Afro-Caribbean, and Chinese heritage. My artistic practice is shaped by inquiries into the socio-political and cultural processes that define our world, guided by the ancestral whispers I try to interpret and integrate into my work.  

How should we navigate our presence here? What compositions help define our being? How could we extract liberating insights from our shared stories? 

My current creative concerns arise from being an immigrant and a man of color in a world molded by oppressive and suppressive practices—practices in which I, too, am entwined. Through my poetics, both literary and pictorial, I contemplate the personal and communal implications of oppression and resistance and reflect on how these dynamics complicate interpersonal and inter-communal relations.

In summary, I attempt to illuminate what clouds our connections, what troubles our prospects of solidarity, and what might hinder the formulation of life-affirming ways to engage and dissolve the hazards we, knowingly or unknowingly, provoke.