Philomé Obin (b.1892-1986)

Self-Portraitg

Painting

WCA Collection

WOrkshop Participants

Headshot of M. Stephanie Chancy

M. Stephanie Chancy

M. Stephanie Chancy is the Green Family Foundation/Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) Fellow at Florida International University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in History at FIU, whose research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century European Atlantic material culture. Stephanie has had several appointments as a lecturer in Art History, and has made numerous presentations to the docents at the University of Miami Lowe Art Museum, and Florida International University’s Patricia and Philip Frost Art Museum. She has curated two Haitian art exhibitions at the Frost Art Museum and conducted research on their Haitian art collection.

Edouard Duval-Carrié

Edouard Duval-Carrié was born in Port-au-Prince. His family emigrated to Puerto Rico while he was a child during the François Duvalier regime. Duval-Carrié studied at the Université de Montréal and McGill University in Canada before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola College, Montréal in 1978. He later attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, from 1988 to 1989. He resided in France for many years and currently lives in Miami, Florida. “I didn’t want to go back to Haiti because of the political turmoil there. I have two kids,” he explains. Instead he resides among Miami’s substantial Haitian immigrant population and maintains cultural ties to his homeland. His works have been exhibited in Europe and the Americas. 

Erica James

Erica M. James is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Miami. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests center on the Arts of the African Diaspora, particularly the Caribbean and the Americas.

Currently on an extended leave as Director and Chief Curator of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Dr. James has held and received numerous fellowships and awards, including the prestigious Clark Fellowship from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, The John Hope Franklin Fellowship at Duke University, and the International Association of University Women graduate fellowship.

Her most recent publications include “Communion,” an essay on the artist Rotimi Fani Kayode, which appeared in the British photography journal Next Level and “The Pleasure of Disorientation” a catalogue essay for The Global Caribbean Exhibition held at the Haitian Cultural Centre, Miami as a part of Art Basel 2009. She is currently working on a book based on her doctoral thesis entitled “Re-Worlding a World: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary.”

Erol Josué

EROL JOSUÉ was born in Port-au-Prince, in the residential neighborhood of Martissant. Born into voodoo, cradled by traditional music, raised in the familial comfort, he was initiated at the age of 17 as a Houngan (voodoo priest) by his mother (Mambo) and stepfather. Today master of peristyle: Sosyite Lafrik Ginen, Erol conducts ceremonies and receives for consultations. He also developed a great knowledge of nature and plants which heal, and officiate as “leaf doctor”, traditional Haitian medicine, with respect for nature. This anchoring and this voodoo culture are inseparable from his personality, his artistic career on the one hand and his anthropological and ethnological knowledge on the other. His natural talents and his skills as a singer and dancer are first manifested in this religion, from which he draws traditional repertoire much of its artistic inspiration. The active voodoo priest has fed the actor and dancer. His music is thus at the crossroads of African- American, Caribbean and European cultures … It is rooted in Haitian, voodoo traditions but drinks from all sources of inspiration.

Peter Haffner

Peter Haffner is Assistant Professor of Art History at Centre College in Danville Kentucky. Haffner’s research focuses on the production, sale, collection, and exhibition of art made in Haiti and its connections with tourism. By studying how artists and collectors operate in a specific system of production, collection, and display, his work provides insight into how people navigate the communicative capabilities of art. He uses an interdisciplinary approach that employs methodologies from curatorial studies, ethnography, theories of tourism, and art history.

Haffner received a B.A. in art history from Bard College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA.

Elizabeth Pierre-Louis

Elizabeth Pierre-Louis was born and raised in Haiti. She is a librarian and a demographer. She studied Social Science, Population Science (Demography) at the University of Paris X-Nanterre and obtained her PhD in Demography in July 2004. She also obtained her Masters’ in Library Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2003. She was the 2015-2016 President of the Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institution Libraries (ACURIL). She is currently Program Coordinator at Fondation Connaissance et Liberté (FOKAL), a Haitian national Foundation part of the Open Society Foundations’ network.

Headshot of Hadassah St. Hubert

Hadassah St. HUbert

Hadassah St. Hubert, Ph.D. is currently the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) at Florida International University. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Miami and her dissertation, Visions of a Modern Nation: Haiti at the World’s Fairs, focuses on Haiti’s participation in World’s Fairs and Expositions in the twentieth century. As a Postdoctoral Fellow with dLOC, she leads programming and digitization efforts in collaboration with dLOC’s partners, such as Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI) and L’Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National (ISPAN) in Haiti.

Katherine Smith

Katherine Smith, is a Lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Visiting Researcher in the UCLA International Institute. She has held fellowships at Brown University and New York University, and publishes regularly in academic journals, edited volumes, and art catalogues. Smith has played a curatorial role in several exhibitions of Haitian art. Her current research focuses on Freemasonry in the Caribbean. 

Laura Wagner

From 2015 to 2019, Laura Wagner was the project archivist for the Radio Haiti Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill, where her research focused on displacement, humanitarian aid, and everyday life in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her writings on the earthquake and the Radio Haiti project have appeared in Slate, Salon, sx archipelagos, PRI’s The World, and other venues. She is also the author of Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go, a young adult novel about the Haiti earthquake (Abrams, 2015). She is currently designing an immersive exhibit titled Radio Haïti-Inter: Three Decades of Resistance, which will take place in spring 2020 at Duke University’s Rubenstein Arts Center, as well as working on a book-length monograph about Radio Haïti-Inter.