Joseph's father Keven Davis was a prominent sports and entertainment attorney, and his younger brother Noah Davis was a painter and museum curator. Joseph attended Loyola Marymount University but did not graduate. Joseph's own approach to filmmaking was influenced by his study of the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai director of experimental films.
Commercial work
Joseph previously worked as an assistant to the photographer Melodie McDaniel and at the commercial film production company Directors Bureau in Los Angeles. He has directed a commercial for British telecomms company O2 and a short film for the luxury brandKenzo. Joseph has directed music videos for Blvck Spvde, Flying Lotus, Shabazz Palaces, Sampha, and Kendrick Lamar among others. Joseph was the original director approached by Beyoncé Knowles to direct the companion film to her 2016 concept album Lemonade. Knowles eventually remixed much of the film with a number of different directors, and has since allowed Joseph's version of Lemonade to be screened only at art museums.
Museum and Gallery Exhibitions and Commissions
In 2014 Kara Walker curated the ICA Philadelphia exhibition Ruffneck Constructivists and included Joseph's 2011 music video for Shabazz Palaces Black Up and the 2012 short film Until the Quiet Comes for the titular Flying Lotus song. In 2015 The Underground Museum presented the exhibition Oracle, displaying works by Joseph and his contemporaries Henry Taylor, Kandis Williams, and Ruby Neri alongside rarities from The Jeremiah Cole Collection of Arts d’Afrique. Joseph's short film m.A.A.d. debuted here for the first time as a double screen projection, and again in the 2016 exhibition Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. However, the 2015 exhibition Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA, was Joseph's first museum-scale exhibition. In addition to exhibiting at The Underground Museum, Noah Davis started this and Kahlil strives to support it in anyway possible. In 2017, Tate Modern commissioned Joseph to create a short film, Black Mary, to debut as part of a special film installation in the final week of the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. The six-minute film was inspired by the photography of Roy DeCarava, and features the singer Alice Smith, among others. Joseph first presented Fly Paper in his 2017 solo exhibitionKahlil Joseph: Shadow Play at New York's New Museum. The film was commissioned by the New Museum in collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, a London-based enterprise. In 2018 Fly Paper made its European debut at The Store X Berlin, and later that year it was shown in London as part of Strange Days: Memories of the Future, presented by the New Museum and The Store X in partnership with The Vinyl Factory. One Day at a Time: Kahlil Joseph's Fly Paper was the final exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art's Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, which closed in 2019, and where Fly Paper was shown for the first time on the West Coast.
