MacKenzie River Foy is a multidisciplinary artist, archivist and culture worker preserving Black technologies, traditions and history. Her practice fuses curation, media, speculative fiction and culinary art.
With a background in Black and queer worker organizing, MacKenzie has a storytelling practice rooted in radical imagination and collective work. Their understanding of the way stories shape culture grew over the decade they spent developing communications strategies for local and national campaigns for ethnic studies, paid family leave, non-carceral public safety infrastructure, union protections, and Black/queer worker power. This, along with her experiences working with food in the restaurant industry, as a farmworker and in her mother’s kitchen inspired her development of culinary fiction zine Village X. She served as the editor-in-chief for all 10 issues of the zine while writing stories and producing short films to accompany her expansion of the culinary fiction canon.
MacKenzie has produced media for The Laura Coates Show on SiriusXM, Market Road Films, Sojourners Magazine, and several national non-profit organizations. Her recipe “Moses’ Waffles” was included in the 2021 Reclamation exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts. She was awarded Best Director (DMV Short Film Festival) and Honorable Mention for Best Documentary Short (Workers Unite Film Festival) for her short film “Feed/back”. Her short film “Strike a Match” was a winner of the 2022 NAACP National Cinematic Shorts Competition.
When she isn’t incubating experiments in sci-fi and food writing, MacKenzie works as a media strategist and producer, amplifying the stories of early career storytellers and growing brands.
Artist Statement
Inspired by the griot of West Africa, my storytelling is deeply connected to my roots, my stolen ancestors, my kin. I learn from them in oral histories, in recipes, in communing with the earth. Currently I’m developing film projects based on the stories of Village X, oral history projects about collective work and education in Baltimore and Philadelphia, and contributing to a national media initiative to center Black joy in journalistic narratives.
I am descended from generations of farmers, teachers, domestic workers, and small business owners. I’m from places called Virginia and South Carolina and Texas and Pennsylvania and New Jersey. There are parts of me I gave birth to, parts of me born in a chocolate city. All of me is currently living happily by the water in Susquehannock and Piscataway Territory, also known as Baltimore, MD.