My work explores states of passage between identities, materials, and technologies. I am interested in what emerges through processes of transition and transformation, where boundaries become unstable and new forms of relation, perception, and becoming take shape. Working across installation, performance, film, video, drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, sound, and digital media, I investigate memory, race, sexuality, and emerging forms of life and identity. I understand artistic practice as telekinetic: activated through the encounter between materials, environments, and viewers. Rather than treating art as a fixed object, I approach it as an active field of relations capable of generating new connections between bodies, images, objects, histories, and technologies.

Raised between Haiti, Benin, and Jamaica, my practice is informed by the overlapping histories, cultures, and mythologies of these places. Through the frameworks of Afrobaroque and Digital Vodunism, I bring together traditional forms of making and emerging technologies to create works that move between material and immaterial worlds, personal and collective histories, and embodied and technological forms of experience. My work seeks to create spaces in which transformation becomes possible and where alternative ways of seeing and inhabiting the world may emerge.

ARTIST STATEMENT

BIO

Déesse is an artist and educator whose work has been supported by national and international residencies, including the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Yaddo (NY), c.r.e.t.a. rome (Italy), the Hungarian Multicultural Center (Hungary), Cholamandal Artists Village (India), Can Serrat (Spain), and Baldwin for the Arts (NY). She has received several awards, such as Best of Show at the Migrations Film Festival (The Front, New Orleans) and the Yaddo Donald and Genie Rice Filmmaker Residency Grant. In 2025, she was nominated for the Anonymous Was A Woman award (pending). Her work has been featured in Art in America, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), and Boston Art Review.

She has exhibited her work—both solo and collaboratively—across the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Recent exhibitions include the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (IN), Black Mountain College Museum & Art Center (NC), Printed Matter, Inc. (NY), Mahmoud Darwish Museum (Palestine), Bogotá Arte Contemporaneo Gallery (Colombia), Galerie Nord (Germany), Greatmore Studios (South Africa), Total Arts Gallery and the Cultural Foundation (UAE), the Katonah Museum of Art (NY), Gallery 263 (MA), and the B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance at the Atlas Institute (CO).

She is currently Director and Professor of the Fine Arts Program and Interim Director of the Art History Program at the American University of Rome.

Curriculum Vitae
Download CV