Jaida Grey Eagle

Jaida Grey Eagle is an Oglala Lakota artist, currently located in St. Paul, MN.  Jaida is a photojournalist, producer, beadwork artist, and writer. She is a member of the Women’s Photograph, Indigenous Photograph, and 400 Years Project.

She is a Report for America Fellow with the Sahan Journal covering communities of color in the Twin Cities. She is also researching Indigenous photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts as an ongoing former Curatorial Fellow.

Jaida is a co-producer on the Sisters Rising Documentary, which is the story of six Native American women reclaiming personal and tribal sovereignty in the face of ongoing sexual violence against Indigenous women in the United States and has recently received an Honorable Mention at the Big Sky Doc Festival. She is passionate about bringing awareness to indigenous issues, especially those which impact indigenous women.

She is also a beadwork artist whose work can be found here. Her work is inspired by her family's usage of color, passed down from a great-grandmother’s star-quilt color philosophy of using six colors or more in every piece. Jaida creates abstractions of her great-grandmother's star quilts as fringed earrings with a blending of colors that are significant to her family's legacy as Lakota artists.

She holds her Bachelor of Fine Arts emphasizing Fine Art Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.