Moira Pernambuco is a studio portrait and street photographer living and working in New Jersey and New York City, United States. She was born to a Black mother and an Indigenous (Wapishana) father in Guyana, a former colony of Britain. Both parents were educators who challenged social conventions of the time – in particular, the prevailing race-based hostility toward a marriage between a Black woman and an Indigenous man. M. Pernambuco’s creative practice finds inspiration in her métis heritage as the daughter of two pioneering professors in her native country and as an immigrant living between worlds. She was brought to the United States at the age of 10 when her mother fled Guyana with her five children during a period defined by civil unrest, repression and racial discrimination.
Initially interested in modern dance, M. Pernambuco found photography after incurring a knee injury that quashed her dream to become a professional dancer. She began taking photographs of her aging grandmother in the mid-1980s with a pocket-sized 110 camera. Since then, she has documented people’s stories and family narratives while honouring her African and Indigenous heritage. She earned a BA from SUNY Purchase College in 1995 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. One of her main artistic references is the work of renowned printmaker and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), who believed in producing art which could communicate to working people everywhere, which could be at their service and could function as a tool for liberation.

From 1995 to 1998, M. Pernambuco developed one of her most acclaimed documentary series, entitled A Tribute to the Ancestors of the Middle Passage. It consists of black and white portraits taken of participants at an annual ceremony on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean on Coney Island in New York. Dressed in white as a symbol of healing, purification and spirituality, participants bring flowers (Save a Space for Me, 1998) and pray to the Orishas (The Re-Builder, 1998) to honour the lives lost during the transatlantic slave trade. In this artwork, M. Pernambuco specifically addressed her identity as a person of African descent and the relationship with the ocean as a place of trauma and memory. The titles of the photographs in the series – Father to Daughter, Cousins and The Inheritance – reinforce, in the words of art historians Daniell Cornell and Cheryl Finley, a shared legacy between the subjects and herself.

The influence of E. Catlett and her convictions on the role of art in society, together with the profession of M. Pernambuco’s parents, have defined the artist’s approach to photography as a medium to inform and educate about her Afro-Indigenous experience. M. Pernambuco’s work can be found in the collections of private and public institutions, such as the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York City, Columbia University’s School of Social Work, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Yale University Art Gallery. She participated in the online exhibition Ancestors Know Who We Are at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, which was a significant landmark for the artist’s career.