She is a visual artist working in a variety of disciplines that include: video, performance, painting, installation and public art. She explores the material culture of coloniality and her art presents countervisualities and narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and invisibility. She has exhibited in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe. Her work has been featured in a wide range of media including: the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, The Guardian, Caribbean Beat, the BBC and Le Monde. She holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba, an MA and a BA from Columbia University in NY. Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.

Taisha is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, sculpture, body adornment, and  installation. Her work seeks to promote solidarity with the land and investigate the liminality of  life in the Caribbean after colonialism and into the Anthropocene. Taisha invents ‘devices’ and  explores performances for self-healing and facilitation of social dialogue about climate justice while proposing methods for rebirth, reclamation, and reimagining the value of Caribbean people  and communities.  

Taisha received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2018 and currently works in Barbados collaborating with biochemists, farmers and medical practitioners to pool knowledge and  resources and shed light on climate change.

To sing, speak and move on behalf of an ecological engagement. I am a plethora of beings creating a sense of belonging through a chain reaction of performative interventions, honouring one location at the time, unraveling a state of deep listening, heightened bodily awareness. Directed currently at the island of my origin. Aruba, the multiculturalism that it breeds, the heritage, a multiple state of identity, and how a gentler, much soothing relationship can come to be. Primarily communicated through the audio-visual forum of live art, video and film.

From the island of New Providence, In the Bahamas, Maria, a self taught filmmaker, with an early passion for film, began her journey working in production at the young age of sixteen.  She worked a time in Los Angeles and then returned home where she spent a decade making small, local, guerilla style documentaries. This lay the foundation for her craft.  Govan then scripted her first narrative feature "Rain," which she directed and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 and licensed to Showtime networks.  In 2012 she moved to Trinidad and in 2015 wrote and directed her second narrative feature "Play the Devil" which received a significant grant from Creative TT.  "Play the Devil" was selected for Ventana Sur in Argentina and Premiera Miradada in IFF Panama, and premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2016.  In 2018, Govan was hired to direct her first episode of television on the show Queen Sugar, which is produced by Ava Duvernay and Oprah Winfrey. She is currently in development of several television and film projects and continues to seek writing and directing opportunities both in the region and beyond.

Visually Impaired Professional - Patrick Lafayette

Patrick Lafayette is a blind individual who has made significant contributions the lives of persons with disabilities in Jamaica, the Caribbean, and internationally. 

He was the first visually disabled individual to be employed to a major commercial radio entity in Jamaica in the 1980’s when he worked with Radio Jamaica’s Fame FM.  

He was a founding member of KLAS FM and later Kool 97 FM. He went on to become station manager at Kool 97 FM before leaving to start his own production company, Twin Audio Network in 2007. He also started his online radio station – www.chrismixradio.com in 2015.

Currently he works with persons with disabilities in Jamaica and the US re the use of the I-phone and other adaptive technologies and was featured by Apple  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whioDJ8doYA in 2017. 

Lafayette has collaborated with foreign and local organisations, including the Dennis Brown Trust, VP Records, the British Broadcasting Corporation BBC, Choice FM in London, and XM Satellite Radio in the USA, to document and produce the history of Jamaica’s music culture.

He is married to Indi and has two children, Leila and Djvan

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist working mainly with video, film, photography, and text. Through multiple approaches to documentation, her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives, examining formal and informal archives, popular imaginaries and visual culture. She has been a resident artist of Museo La Ene (Argentina), Alice Yard (T&T), Solar (Tenerife) and the Smithsonian. She was also Co-director of the artist-run organization Beta-Local from 2014 to 2020. Her work has been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, the Getty’s PST: LA/LA, ifa Galerie in Berlin and CCA Glasgow, among others.

Daphne MENARD completes studies in theatre in July 2015 in Haiti. Practicing contemporary dance, music, theater and writing, he founded “Sol Scène Association” that is interested in transdisciplinary research with the body as the raw material. He created in November 2016, "Omayra, the choir of the abyss” a play that questions the power of this world yet so weak in front of some little situations. Since October 2018 he has implemented the Transdo art creation laboratory between Haitian and Dominican artists. What gave a cross-disciplinary play in March 2020 in Santo Domingo questioning the concept of memory on the island.

REDJI (Reginald Sénatus), born in 1994, grew up in a district of downtown Port-au-Prince (Haiti), near the artists and cabinetmakers of the Grand-Rue. In 2010, he joined Atis Rezistans, a community of artists specializing in salvage sculpture.

Since 2011, Redji has participated in several editions of the Ghetto Biennale de Port-au-Prince.

In the 2017 edition, he presented an installation entitled "Cartography of Port-Au-Prince" and took stock of the socio-economic difficulties of the population. He won the first prize of the biennial, and also that of 2019 with a new artistic installation entitled "Walls and Doors of Vertières".

Camille Chedda was born in Jamaica where she studied painting at the Edna Manley College. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She has exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Museum of Latin American Art, has received awards including the Reed Foundation Scholarship and the British Council’s TAARE Award, and completed residencies at Art Omi (New York) and Hospitalfield (Scotland). She lives and works in Kingston, Jamaica.

Carol Sorhaindo is a Visual artist with an MA in Creative Practice and a diverse portfolio career. She draws inspiration from nature, cultural heritage and landscapes with a particularly interest in plants on deteriorating mill sites in Dominica where she currently lives. Having lived in both the UK and Dominica, entangled roots and history which combines African, Dominican and British influences are of key importance. Her research and passions include plant histories and traditional uses, botanical drawing and explorations of plant, earth pigments and natural fibres sources. These processes are incorporated into her drawing, painting, textile design and sculpture work. 

Gwladys Gambie 

Born in 1988, Martinique 

Lives and works in Fort-de-France, Martinique.  

Graduated to Campus Caraibéen des Arts of Martinique in 2014, Gwladys Gambie has shown  her artwork in collective and solo shows in Martinique, Cuba, Aruba, Miami, French Guyana.  Recently, she participated virtually to the 12th biennal of Mercosul in Brazil.  

The main questionning of Gwladys Gambie is the condition and decolonial representation of  black woman through drawing and sculpture practice. She is inspired by the caribbean  landscape which belong to her imaginary and add oniric dimension in her graphic writting.  Creole, strong picture language, becomes a main element to create a specific iconography to  her work about black female body. She is talking about sexuality, race and gender in a  westindian society where stereotypes and consequences of colonialism are still presents.

Héctor Eliazar Ortiz (Santo Domingo 1981) 

Engineering Studies (UNPHU) and Photography (EAF, Buenos Aires). 2009-2012. He makes his first exhibitions participating in the underground artistic movements of Buenos Aires through feminist collectives and LGTBQI. 2012-2014. He returns to Santo Domingo and is an Honorable Mention at the XXVII Santo Domingo Biennial among other awards and recognitions. 2014-2019. He settled in Las Terrenas and began to work with materials from the milieu incorporating the environment into his speech. In 2018 he participated in the 27 Eduardo León Jimenes contest where he won a residency that he would carry out in 2019 at the Memorial Acte Museum of Guadalupe, that same year he was selected for the Ghetto Biennale in Puerto Principe. In 2020 he is invited to participate in Zona Maco Sur in CDMX.

Jorge González  b. 1981

Lives and works in Boriquén (Puerto Rico)

Jorge González’s work can be stated as a long-term theoretical-practical research on productive models and pre-colonial artisan techniques of Borikén. Jorge’s practice is commonly collective and implies mutual learning processes from which approaches are derived to understand the relationships between the native and the modern, between the industrial and the manual, between the amateur and the master. 

In 2014, he founded Escuela de Oficios, an underlying support structure of his practice, in response to dominant historical omissions and deteriorating academic spaces. By proposing and attempting a recovery through community regeneration, EO creates spaces for collective learning and promotes self-directed education.

Joshua Clarke is a graduate of the Barbados Community College with a BFA in Graphic Design. He has worked in game development as a character, environment and concept artist(Le Loupgarou), as sequential artist on graphic novels (Power in the Blood GreenBook Comics 2020) was a semifinalist in the Kingstoon Pitch Competition(Junkyard Dragon 2019) and is the winner of the first Black Celebration in the Future art contest(2020). A lifelong love of fantasy and sci-fi has led to a career representing the fullness of Blackness in his work.and a focus on Afrofuturism and Afrofantasy.

Lisa Allen-Agostini is a writer and editor from Trinidad and Tobago. She is half of the feminist comedy duo FemCom TT and writes and performs comedy under the name Just Lisa. Lisa has been awarded as a journalist, poet and fiction writer. Her most recent book, the YA novel Home Home (Delacorte Press; Papillote Press), was republished in May. Her books include Swallowing the Sky [Cane Arrow Press], The Chalice Project (Macmillan Caribbean) and Trinidad Noir (Akashic Books). Some of her comic short films will debut in the NGC Bocas Lit Fest 2020.

Sonia Farmer is a Bahamian writer, book artist, publisher, and educator whose practice shifts the gaze in forming Caribbean identity, culture, and space. Through her small press, Poinciana Paper Press, she works with writers and artists to advance cultural ownership and voice in Caribbean narratives and self-publishes her poetry collections, chapbooks, and artist’s books, including "Infidelities" (longlist, 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature) and "A True & Exact History" (winner, 2019 Holle Award for Excellence in Book Arts & semi-finalist, the MCBA Prize). She is currently building a center for book arts in The Bahamas.

Ada M. Patterson (Bridgetown, 1994) is a visual artist and writer based between Barbados, London and Rotterdam. They work with masquerade, textiles, performance, video and poetry, telling new stories or rethinking old stories in new recuperative ways. Solo exhibitions include "The Whole World is Turning" at TENT Platform voor hedendaagse kunst, Rotterdam (2020). They have exhibited with Live Art Development Agency, London; Barbados Museum & Historical Society, Bridgetown; Ateliers ’89, Oranjestad; Alice Yard, Port-of-Spain. Their writing has featured in ARC Magazine, Fresh Milk Art Platform, Sugarcane Magazine, PREE, Mister Motley and Metropolis M.

Angelika Wallace-Whitfield (born 1993 Nassau, Bahamas) attended The College of The Bahamas where she studied Fine Art. Over the years, Wallace-Whitfield has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. In 2017 she graduated from the University of Kent, Canterbury, U.K. with a BA honors degree in the History & Philosophy of Art, and returned home to manage curatorial work at both The Central Bank of The Bahamas and The Current: Bahamar Gallery and Art Center, Angelika is now a self-employed artist, specializing in murals and other public artworks.

Franz Caba  (1991) is an Architect and self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose work is an intimate exercise that explores issues around identity, body and vulnerability. 

Born and raised in Dominican Republic. He holds an architecture degree from Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (2017) and is currently enrolled in a master in contemporary art at the same university.  

Caba has participated in Caribbean Linked V art residency (2018). He has exhibited his work in Dominican Republic and Aruba. He was awarded by Premio Diario Libre de Arte Contemporáneo (2015) and has been selected for several art contests in Dominican Republic.

Born in Guadeloupe and graduated from the Faculty of Toulouse in visual arts, Kelly Sinnapah Mary develops introspective work where the creative process rubs shoulders with everyday gestures and current affairs. In a universe of gentleness and intimacy, the artist deals with all forms of domination. In her recent work, "Notebook: the fire next time", fire is very present; her religious imagination is made up of Jesus Christ or Moses rather than Hindu deities, and in this Christian imagination, fire holds an important place. It is the symbol of judgment and purification. The artist deals with the hour of purification that has come, not for humans, but for their institutions and systems of thought.

Las Nietas de Nonó is an art collective composed of two Afro-diasporic sisters, Mulowayi Iyaye Nonó and Mapenzi Chibale Nonó raised between the Manuel A. Pérez housing project in Río Piedras and the San Antón neighborhood in Carolina, Puerto Rico. They are multimedia artists that explore experimental theater as a way to investigate and reflect on the complexities of spirituality, violence, race, and migration in the island-colony context highlighting circumstances and elements that are present in their neighborhoods: the expansion of ancestral knowledge, the exchange of locally grown food and the reuse of found materials. In their creative process, they evoke personal archives to expose the systematic oppressions that people of color have lived through for generations.

Although educated as a civil technical engineer, Miguel Keerveld operates as a social researcher while leading MISSION 21. The network MISSION 21 is related to the practice of intuitive coaching. Visual language and creative writing allow our network space-time to activate social change through interventions and agency. As an independent artist, represented by the brand EdKe and the performance persona Tumpi Flow, Miguel reflects on socio-politics. As cyborg feminist, ‘he’ combines  creative documentation with sustainability and change. Currently, ‘she’ is focused on understanding art systems in Latin America and on an International Mentoring Program awarded by Arquetopia Foundation in Puebla, Mexico.

Myrlande Constant began working with textiles as a youth working in a wedding dress factory. After leaving her job, she used the same beading technique she practiced in the factory to revolutionize Haiti’s renowned textile arts. Constant draws inspiration from traditional drapo Vodou (Vodou banners). However, her works’ elaborate narratives, their unprecedented scale, and the complex historical and moral perspectives behind her tableaux move the tradition in new directions. Her work is collected by major museums including: Le Musée du Quai Branly, The Lowe Art Museum, The Fowler Museum, The Perez Art Museum, and The American Folk Art Museum.

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, and essayist. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 People's Choice T&T Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Shivanee was shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize for Poetry. “The Red Thread Cycle”, from her debut collection, won a Small Axe Literary Competition Prize for Poetry (second-place), and was on audiovisual display at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas in 2019.