The Center for Afrofuturist Studies

01/14/2026

We're collaborating with the Iowa City Senior Center and other community organizations for Parables of the Future: Black Future Fest!
Check out the events coming up around downtown including an open house at the CAS, a screening at FilmScene with filmmaker Nateya Taylor in person, an art & fashion showcase, and an Octavia Butler reading group.
https://www.icgov.org/government/departments-and-divisions/senior-center/black-future-fest-parables-of-the-future

09/25/2024

Today at 6pm!

Join us for Reversed Memories at the Iowa Crossroads, a program of video by interdisciplinary artist Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet with the Latino Midwest Video Collective/Laboratorio Cartodigital. This work spans from 1987 to 2010 and includes popular memory, migration, exile, the politics of desire and experimental production.

We’re so excited to welcome Raul in person— an alum of the UI Intermedia program at the who has worked with The Center for Afrofuturist Studies and is currently serving as co-executive director of the Howard University Gallery of Art. This screening is presented in conjunction with the LNACC almuni reunion. Videos restored by the Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University, Canada.

free admission • run time 47 minutes • at PS1 Close House (538 S Gilbert)

video program by Raul Moarquech Ferrerea-Balanquet

08/15/2024

Saturday night at 7pm in Iowa City!! Join CAS curator Anaïs Duplan, Mipsterz - Muslim Hipsters, and a whole crew of awesome folks for an energetic evening of short talks, stories, and music, to celebrate the closing of ALHAMDU | MUSLIM FUTURISM!
RSVP at www.publicspaceone.com/events/minarets-on-mars

07/12/2024

it feels wild to say this but it's true! we started working on the CAS project in 2015. at this ten-year mark, we're wondering about what the future should look like!

what are your dream Black art spaces? what are you hoping to get from Black art spaces that you aren't getting?

06/11/2024

Thursday at 7pm! Join us for a public artist talk by artist-in-residence Courtney Desiree Morris at PS1 Close. (We’ll also go live here for those not in Iowa City.)

Courtney will share recent work and work-in-progress from her Iowa City residency through the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. Free and open to all!

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/performance artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (2023, Rutgers University Press). Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Her work is primarily concerned with ancestral memory, ritual work, ecology, climate change, death, mourning and funerary practice, erotics, and black feminist aesthetics.

05/28/2024

We’re thrilled to be collaborating with for Muslim Futurism: Films Defining a Genre on Fri June 7 as the kick off to Iowa City programming this summer.
Tickets are pay-what-you-can and get you into this program of short films by Arafat Mazhar, Larissa Sansour, Kashif Pasta, Søren Lind, and Abbas Rattani, followed by a post-screening conversation and food!

Thanks to GIG Fund and FilmScene’s Community Collaborations program for supporting this event!

Get your tix at the link in our bio!!