MacKenzie River Foy (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, archivist and culture worker preserving Black technologies, traditions and history. Her practice fuses curation, media, speculative fiction and culinary art. MacKenzie was born at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center on April 25th, 1997 and lived in Harlem, New York until she was three years old, moving with her parents and younger sister to nearby Teaneck, New Jersey. Her mother is Karla Yvonne Foy, from North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and her father is Jason Errol Foy, from Englewood, New Jersey.
MacKenzie attended high school at Bergen County Academies where she studied on the Science and Technology track. It was there they began to organize with other students of color, forming a youth chapter of the NAACP to demand the school expand their annual diversity assembly into a student-led day of ethnic studies. This community organizing continued as she matriculated into Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 2015. There, she received a degree in American Studies with a minor in Film and Media Studies (COL '19) while organizing with the campus NAACP and Students for Justice in Palestine chapters as well as the Kalmanovitz Initiative for the Working Poor.
Her writing practice also began during this time, as MacKenzie wrote, directed, and produced short films, music videos and an original play with local artists and students. MacKenzie has a storytelling practice rooted in radical imagination and collective work. Their understanding of the way stories shape culture grew during the years after college that they spent developing communications strategies for local and national campaigns for paid family leave, non-carceral public safety infrastructure, union protections, and Black/queer worker power.
They have produced media for The Laura Coates Show on SiriusXM, Market Road Films, Sojourners Magazine, and several national non-profit organizations. This, along with their experiences working with food in the restaurant industry, as a farmworker and in her mother's kitchen inspired her development of culinary fiction zine Village X in 2020. She served as the editor-in-chief for all 10 issues of the zine while writing stories and producing short films to accompany her expansion of the culinary fiction canon.
In 2021 MacKenzie moved to Baltimore, Maryland. That year, her recipe "Moses' Waffles" was included in the Reclamation exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts. She was awarded Best Director (2021 DMV Short Film Festival) and Honorable Mention for Best Documentary Short (2022 Workers Unite Film Festival) after completing her short film “Feed/back”. Her short film “Strike a Match” was a winner of the 2022 NAACP National Cinematic Shorts Competition. In 2023 MacKenzie received a Maryland State Arts Council Grant to continue her work archiving oral histories of the labor movement in Baltimore, and joined the efforts of local community groups to preserve and archive the legacy of the city's Black queer artists.