Stephen Clay is an image-installation artist based in Chicago, Illinois. His work primarily draws on black, indigenous, and diasporic histories, with his interdisciplinary practice examining the interactions among land, memory, displacement, and the confinement of the black queer body. Clay's career began at the Los Angeles High School for the Arts, studying film. He later began studying photography at Santa Monica Community College in 2022. Graduating from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2026, Clay is now building his work and career using the bricks from his past. Through photography, video installation, and sculptural intervention, his work interrogates the violence embedded in settler colonialism and continual cultural erasure. Showing in Filter Context 2026 and The Image Flows Queer Conscience 2025, Clay continues to be an emerging voice in the national photo community.