Photo: Rachell Morillo
Dessane Lopez Cassell is a New York-based editor, writer, and curator. She works across film and visual art and their intersections, with a particular interest in documentary, video art/artist’s moving image, race, gender, decoloniality, and voices from the African and Caribbean diasporas.
Cassell’s writing has been published in various magazines, journals, and books, including the Los Angeles Times, the Criterion Collection, Hyperallergic, Film Comment, and Seen journal, as well as catalogues issued by the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has curated exhibitions and screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Metrograph, MoMA, the Studio Museum, Anthology Film Archives, and the Black Women’s Film Conference, among elsewhere, and served on the programming team for BlackStar Film Festival from 2018 to 2023.
Cassell is Vice President of the board of The Flaherty and a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the writer’s cooperative, Flaming Hydra. She was named a DOC NYC Documentary New Leader in 2022. Previously, Cassell served as Editor-in-Chief of BlackStar’s journal, Seen, where she platformed. film, art, and visual culture writing by and about people of color, with an emphasis on nuanced, slow journalism. Prior to joining Seen, she was the first dedicated reviews editor at Hyperallergic, where she focused on championing writers and artists from underrepresented communities and growing the publication’s film coverage.
Additionally, Cassell has produced and hosted podcasts and radio projects for Microsoft (in collaboration with Listen), Roskilde Festival (Denmark), Bay FM and Creative X (both South Africa). Cassell is a former Fulbright fellow, and has received scholarly awards and fellowships from Duke University, the Ford Foundation, CUNY Graduate Center, and Oberlin College.
Raised in New York City, Cassell is of Dominican and African American descent. Her name is pronounced <dah-sawn loh-pez kuh-sell>.