![anartistliveshere_jarretthill](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-06/anartistliveshere_portfolio_Page_17.jpg?h=f3a9ec39&itok=B18umbnE) # an artist lives here: jarrett hill on Queerness, the Black Church, and Coming Alive at Harvard Divinity School June 25, 2025 Natalie Cherie Campbell , MTS '18 - [ Profiles ](/news-categories/profiles) An award-winning journalist and artist, [jarrett hill](https://www.jarretthill.com/), MRPL ‘25, brings a Black, Christian, queer perspective to everything he does. “That perspective has always been a big part of my work, whether as a journalist, professor, author, creative artist, standup comic, speaker, host, media trainer and consultant, or contributor,” hill explains. “People who know me or my work well know how church-y I am and look at my choice to come to Harvard Divinity School and say, ‘Oh, that makes perfect sense.’” hill points to FANTI, a podcast he co-hosted with Tre’vell Anderson, and, in particular, the episode “when gospel music slaps and leaves a mark,” as an example. That episode, he says, is a “perfect depiction of one of the major conflicts that I’ve had in my life.” He describes the episode as “pivotal,” saying, “it was about our really mixed feelings about gospel music and the ways that it can provide comfort, solace, community, and connection while also being a major source of pain, confusion, frustration, and distance between us and God.” Similarly, he continues, “When I got to HDS, I was really interested in clearing up questions that I had about God and queerness—queerness’s relationship to God, and whether or not Christianity was holding that. I also came thinking about the queer and trans people who come to the Black Church tradition. I wanted to figure out how to get some freedom for that community of folks. That’s what really brought me to our HDS community.” hill recalls the words of Diane L. Moore, then associate dean of Religion and Public Life and MRPL seminar professor, who said, “Expect that your project will probably grow or change or evolve. If you come here and have access to all the resources that we have and spend time here and nothing about your project changes, you maybe didn't need to come to Harvard to do it.” And for hill, that turned out to be true. He says, “I came in thinking as a journalist and wanting to write this manifesto or do a conference and some write-up in a big outlet. I intended to leave with a big call to action to the Church to be better and more inclusive and thoughtful about this community.” He continues, “the reason I’m here here shifted, though. Pretty quickly, I realized I was not interested in focusing this part of my life and work in opposition to systems or trying to get people to see my humanity. I was actually interested in serving the community of people who have been subject to some harmful theology that’s prevalent in the Black Church tradition.” A catalyzing moment for hill’s transforming purpose, project, and process was when he discovered the words of Black theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” hill recalls, “It was at the beginning of my second semester, and I was like, ‘Yes, that is what it is.’ I came here not realizing how many questions I still had about myself. I came here wanting to get our community free, and I was like, ‘No, I actually need to get me free first.’” !["come alive 1.0" by jarrett hill](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/2025-06/anartistliveshere_portfolio_Page_07.jpg) Courtesy jarrett hillFollowing Thurman’s advice, hill found himself leaning into his artist side and asking questions like, “How can I use my creativity, my voice, my platform, my resume, my network, my experience, and my creative arts going forward to help that community of folks?” Thurman’s quote inspired the title for one of hill’s abstract pieces, “come alive,” and also ended up becoming one of the central touchstones in his final project, an art exhibit: “an artist lives here.” hill recalls other moments of significant change. In the first semester, hill received the same piece of advice from multiple people. “Professor Tracey Hucks was a guest speaker in ‘Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion,’ and she said to ‘write from your center.’ She was talking about our embodied knowledge and listening to ourselves and to our hearts. I went directly home and pulled out a marker and some recycled paper. I made this piece, “(create) from your center,” and it's been over my couch for months now. That was the first time I made art in response to something that had happened in class.” !["(create) from your center" by jarrett hill](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/2025-06/anartistliveshere_portfolio_Page_03.jpg) Courtesy jarrett hillOne of hill’s last art pieces taps into his evolving understanding of his sense of belonging at Harvard, both as a Black person specifically and a graduate student more generally. The art piece, “the aye-ch,” a black H that is themed in his style, was inspired by the words of W.E.B DuBois. DuBois was Harvard’s first Black doctoral graduate, and when he was asked if he was honored to be at Harvard, he replied, “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard's.” hill explains, “Being a Black person at Harvard is a very mixed experience. It's a very complicated, layered place that brings up a lot of different feelings. Some of them are awe and wonder and grandeur and some of them are pain and horror; there is a lot of history to this place.” He continues, “I’m also a college dropout; going to grad school was not something that was on my list of things to do. But I’m in this room. Along with the MRPL cohort who in 20 years, in 10 years, in 5 years, will be changing the world with ideas we talked about here—I’m one of these people, too, and I contribute something here. I’ve had to wrap my mind around all of this, and I've been saying to friends that I walk on this campus and feel grateful but not *too* grateful. I appreciate better now that I do bring something to this place, that I add something to this space.” !["the honor, i assure you, was harvard's" by jarrett hill](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/2025-06/anartistliveshere_portfolio_Page_16.jpg) Courtesy jarrett hillOne art medium that both challenged and changed hill was abstraction. “I've been a communicator throughout my entire career,” he says, “and I was intrigued by the opportunity abstraction would give me to communicate in a way that I hadn’t before.” Recalling a specific moment with his professor, hill recounts, “My professor came to me after a few weeks of class and told me that everything doesn't have to have content. I was like, ‘Come again?’ What is that really, especially to a content creator? I've been a journalist and author, so I'm always trying to say something.’ So I asked her what she meant, and she said that everything doesn't have to say something and that sometimes you can just let the thing begin to show you what it is. After hearing that, I was like, ’Okay, okay, sure. Yeah, we'll try that. That sounds cute, abstract artist professor.’” hill did try it, and it turned into a series titled, “say less.” “That was paradigm shifting for me,” he says. “I’ve been seeing the ways in which creating that work has been informing my life in other ways as well. Now I have all these abstracts that I'm really, really in love with that have been like, ’listen, just tune in. Don't come with something all the time.’” !["say less" abstracts by jarrett hill](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/2025-06/anartistliveshere_portfolio_Page_10.jpg) Courtesy jarrett hillhill also credits Diane L. Moore and the MRPL seminar as key factors in him finding clarified direction and an enriched approach to his work. One example relates to his company trblmkng, which provides DEI-centered media training and consulting. He shares, “I wear a necklace around my neck with a ring that has “trblmkr” engraved on it, referencing John Lewis and making a good trouble, but also Bayard Rustin, who talked about the need for angelic troublemakers in our society and our culture. Those two things coming together have been troublemaking for me, and I will say now the RPL program with the way that it looks at religion and power and peace.” Thinking of our present moment, as we see increasing scrutiny and challenges to efforts that promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, hill reminds us, “That approach says a lot more about the people whose mission it is to dismantle those things than it does about the people who have been benefiting from those systems. It’s important to interrogate why it's a priority for an entire community of people to say, ‘Let's take away people's rights. Let's shut down these conversations. Let's demean, degrade, dehumanize people.’ Those world views have a mission. They exist for a reason, for a purpose. We've got to be constantly assessing those things, giving ourselves some grace, and then organizing.” !["great again" by jarrett hill](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/2025-06/anartistliveshere_portfolio_Page_06.jpg) Courtesy jarrett hillHe continues, “We live in times that we've never really been prepared for in a lot of ways, but that we've also been prepared for in a lot of other ways. We're in perilous times. We're going to have to make decisions that we've never had to make before. We'll have choices before us that have not been before us before. But I think that places like this help us figure out how to think in those moments, how to ask questions in those moments, how to approach these moments with some kind of a perspective that can be useful for the ends that we seek.” In particular, hill is grateful for the perspective on peacebuilding laid out in a core text for the Religion and Public Life program: John Paul Lederach’s *The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace.* “One of the first things I remember reading in it,” he says, “was that peace doesn't just happen. It takes development. It takes ideology. It takes ideation. It takes strategy. It takes people. It takes community. It takes time. It takes so many different things, and I had not thought about it that way before.” He continues, “I think the Religion and Public Life program has done a really, really great job getting me to think about systems differently—how we use them, how we approach them, how they affect us, and how we can utilize them for just peacebuilding. I think that's incredibly important. I can't speak to where this program will go in the future or what it will become, but I can say that it has been incredibly valuable for me in this current iteration.” For hill, being an MRPL student gave him the opportunity, space, and time to ask some of his most profound questions. And the ideas he encountered, the advice he received, the paradigm shifts he experienced as he explored his creativity in the context of HDS’s multi-religious environment, and RPL’s capacious approach to just peacebuilding proved personally defining. !["untitled" by jarrett hill](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/2025-06/anartistliveshere_portfolio_Page_09.jpg) Courtesy jarrett hillHe reflects, “I came here wanting to change the world. I came here wanting to fix everything. I came here asking, ‘How do I leave with this big call to action that’ll change the Church?’ But I don't have to save the world. I can now see how many people are thinking about these things and doing work on these issues. I can now appreciate my real job, which is to figure out what my contribution is. What is my contribution to the peacebuilding that I'm looking for? What is my contribution to the just world at peace that matters to me? What is my contribution to this community? That is what I feel really called to be a part of. I've really, really loved that.” hill now frames his contribution as resistance work, a work more encompassing of care and creative liberation than he had previously conceived. He explains, “Even just serving community—wanting people to feel good about themselves, to see more in themselves, to see more possibility for themselves—that is resistance work. And, if the work that you're doing is not diverse or inclusive or fostering belonging or any of those things, it might not be the resistance work you think it is.” As exhausted as hill is at the end of his program, he feels “energized by the possibility of the development of \[his\] community, and he is ready to get out there” now that he has “a different perspective and a different goal in making the world a better place.” He is leaving with a slate of creative projects on the horizon, including a stand-up special, a young adult book, a documentary project, and other multi-disciplinary, artistic projects that he ”doesn’t even know exist yet.” But, above all, hill says, “I’m leaving with a better sense of how I can use the work that I have done, that I'm doing, that I envision, to be part of my just peacebuilding. It’s been an extraordinary time, invaluable.” !["the aye-ch" by jarrett hill](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/2025-06/anartistliveshere_portfolio_Page_04.jpg) Courtesy jarrett hill See also:- [ Religious Literacy and the Professions ](/news/religious-literacy-and-professions) - [ MRPL ](/news/mrpl)