Rodell Warner (Trinidadian, b. 1986) works in photography and new media, animating archival images to explore race, nature and the technologies used to represent them. He draws on personal and institutional archives, including early Caribbean photography, to rethink the past and imagine emancipatory futures.,Warner grew up in Belmont, Port of Spain, and has lived and worked between Trinidad, Jamaica, Texas and Massachusetts.,,
He came to photography almost by accident, first collaging internet images onto homemade t-shirts as a teenager and later buying a camera simply to save money on stock photos. His first professional assignment came from a newspaper, shooting a daily photo strip called Moments of Peace. Unable to afford art school, he learned largely on his own while working alongside older Trinidadian artists who were grappling with how globalization was reshaping the country.That question of what to preserve carried into works such as Artificial Archive, one of his animated interventions into early Caribbean photography, which received an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2025.,
In 2022 his work appeared in “Fragments of Epic Memory” at the Art Gallery of Ontario.,He received the Tito's Prize in Austin, Texas, which included the solo exhibition “Fictions More Precious” at Big Medium in 2024.,In 2025 the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University presented his first solo museum exhibition, “Rodell Warner + Audubon + His Journals”, in which he animated text and images from John James Audubon's writings and Birds of America lithographs to question the naturalist's legacy.,That year he was also chosen by public vote for the Museum of the Moving Image's Community Curation series, which displayed his thirteen-year moving-image archive World Is Turning on its Schlosser Media Wall.,,His generative web piece Ghosts of The Internet Archive, commissioned by Gray Area to mark the Internet Archive's trillionth webpage, was installed at the Internet Archive in San Francisco that same year.,
