CLARIVEL/UTOPIA

We, daughter from Ayiti Kiskeya (aka Hispaniola aka Dominican Republic and Haiti), a land colonized but never conquered, raised in New York City on the ancestral bones and covered shrines of the Lenape people. Our art practice is to decolonize and unravel the racialized framework we live in to heal wounds created by eurocentrism.

We have an MFA in Media, CUNY City College. Seven years managing youth media at DCTV, a Sundance & Emmy Award for “Bullets In The Hood,” we’ve conducted town hall community screenings in NY & CT w/an interactive bus. We are a quarter-finalist in the Nicholls Fellowship in Screenwriting and semi-finalist of the Sundance Screenwriter’s Workshop for the feature script 4 Parts and the Fade In Screenwriter’s Competition for the short script Grey. Our poem Street Messiah aired in the documentary called “De La Vega” by Michael P. Britto.

In 2016 we initiated Dominicans Love Haitians Movement bringing together Dominican and Haitians to celebrate our commonalities through poetry and music at The Nuyorican and Wow Theatre Café. We curated The Deported documentary and panel discussion in partnership with Doc Forum @CCNY and Third World Newsreel, showcasing the movie to 80 youth in partnership at DCTV.  

Through the project Dominicans Love Haitians Movement, we were accepted into Culture Push’s Utopian Fellowship and the 2017 cohort of Hemispheric Institute’s EmergeNYC program to further develop ourselves as an artist-activist. We became part of the 2016 Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matters performance group that developed work for Simon Lee’s gallery exhibit at the New Museum and, in 2017, Brooklyn Museum’s closing event. We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–1985 and Art In Odd Places: Sense exhibit.

In 2018, we participated and further developed our activist performance practice in Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative and worked as an Associate Artist for Ebony Golden’s 125th Street and Freedom showcasing through The National Black Theatre. We participated in Art In Odd Places, Body! exhibit, and we are an NEA recipient for Dominicans Love Haitians Movement. In 2018, we incorporated the project into a nonprofit organization.

We raised over $5,000 in donated black dolls sent to Haiti and handcrafted dolls made by a group of Caribbean New York City residents that were sent to The Mariposa Foundation, Cabarete, DR. August 2018, we completed a collaborative residency at NutureARTS creating Black dolls to resist media and cultural messages that devalue negritude called Sewing Room: Hands-on Black Freedom and asked participants to join us in making handcrafted dolls.