Derek Anthony Holland, MFA, MPH (born in Montgomery, AL) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice moves fluidly across film, sculpture, painting, performance, and installation, engaging with the complexities of identity, race, and systems of knowledge. Raised between Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia and now based in New York, Holland draws on an academic background in public health and an artistic trajectory rooted in critical inquiry. Their work navigates the intersections of personal experience, structural inequality, and the ontological and epistemological frameworks that shape human existence.

At the core of Holland’s practice is the transformation of quotidian experiences into layered visual and conceptual forms. Through processes of documentation—writing, photographing, annotating—the artist captures fragments of daily life, from moments of solitude to the stark realities of mental health crises in public space. These collected observations become material for works that oscillate between representation and abstraction, interrogating the mechanics of identity construction across race, gender, and physical and intellectual (dis)ability. By repurposing tools of modernity—camera phones, notebooks, and data-collection methods—Holland reconfigures the clinical language of research into aesthetic gestures, reframing empirical labor as artistic ritual.

Holland’s trajectory reflects a deep commitment to bridging the discursive spaces of art and public health. Formerly a Research Manager, they contributed to scholarship on health equity, racialization, and community-based research, with publications in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies and Journal of Urban Health. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a pivotal shift, redirecting Holland’s methodology toward art as a critical apparatus for exploring systemic disparities. This transition culminated in an MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where they engaged interdisciplinary dialogues across Black Studies, Criminology, and Visual Arts, grounding their creative process in both theory and lived experience.

Philosophically, Holland’s work is guided by mantric questions: Who are you to yourself and to others? How do constructed identities operate within specific contexts? These inquiries manifest in multimedia assemblages that often incorporate annotations—literal and metaphorical—drawing lines between historical thinkers and contemporary cultural workers. Influences such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Jack Whitten, and Mary Lovelace O’Neal permeate the work, positioning it within a lineage of Black intellectual and artistic traditions while challenging modernist paradigms of identity and authorship.

Exhibited nationally and internationally—including the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Blanc Gallery in Chicago, and residencies in Berlin and Guatemala—Holland’s practice resists disciplinary containment. It is, instead, an evolving inquiry: a sustained negotiation between scholarship and sensibility, data and gesture, the intimate and the systemic.