Gina Athena Ulysse

Gina Athena Ulysse, is an artist-scholar and Professor of Feminist Studies. Concerned with the visceral in the structural, her research questions engage geopolitics, historical representations, and aesthetics in the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions. In the last two decades, her rasanblaj approach (gathering ideas, things, people, and spirits) to her art and writing practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Her major publications include Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importing, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self Making in Jamaica (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Her second book, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), is a tri-lingual publication of short-form essays and opinion pieces translated by Evelyne Trouillot and Nadeve Menard with a foreword by historian Robin D. G. Kelley. Ulysse is an alum of the Op-Ed Project. Her third book, Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)–is a collection of poetry, performance texts, and photographs–was also long-listed for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award and received the 2018 Best Poetry Connecticut Center for the Book Award. A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics, her latest book, is an abridged edition edited by Penelope Papaillas translated into Greek by Vangelis Poulios (forthcoming Summer 2023). She was the invited editor of e-misferica’s Caribbean Rasanblaj, the Hemispheric Institute’s Journal for Performance and Politics. In 2020, she was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney, Australia. Over the years, she has been invited to perform at The British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Gorki Theatre, House of World Cultures, LaMaMa, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, MoMA Salon, among other venues.