Raised in and around Los Angeles, Martine Syms spent her formative teen years in the city’s rich DIY scene working at Ooga Booga bookstore and exploring experimental cinema at the Echo Park Film Center. Syms attended community college for two years before moving to Chicago to study art and technology at SAIC. Upon graduating with her BFA, she cofounded Golden Age, a bookstore and project space in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. After nearly five years of cultivating community, the space closed in 2011. Syms returned to Los Angeles the following year and founded Dominica Publishing, an artist-run press centered around Black arts and aesthetics.

Since returning to the West Coast, Syms has become known for a creative practice that, with a humorous attention to the absurdity of daily life, critically examines blackness in the digital age. Informed by popular media, radical feminist thought, and Black vernacular traditions, her work both conceptually and materially considers the influence of media and technology on the perception and performance of race and gender.

Syms’s work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago Hammer Museum, Hessel Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Syms’s work first entered the Studio Museum in Harlem’s permanent collection in 2015. Her first feature film, The African Desperate, debuted at New Directors/New Films 2022 at MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center.