Born in Colgate, Jamaica, in 1960, Renée Cox is a Jamaican-American artist and photographer whose three-decade practice has made her one of the most consequential voices in contemporary Black art. Working almost exclusively with her own body as subject, Cox reconstructs canonical images from Western art history and religious iconography — inserting Black bodies, and often her own family, into compositions that have historically excluded them. Her work moves fluidly between formal rigor and pointed critique, using the camera to interrogate race, gender, and the politics of representation. Cox has described her aim as producing art that unsettles comfort and opens honest discourse.