The American Ethnological Society is delighted to announce the appointment of Gina Athena Ulysse as the section’s first Artist-In-Residence.  Professor Ulysse is a Haitian American feminist artist-anthropologist and self-described PostZoraInterventionist who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is currently Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. In the last three decades, her decolonial work as a cultural anthropologist has engaged in crossings and dialogues between the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Her practice is rooted in what she calls rasanblaj – a gathering of ideas, people, things, and spirits.  Her approach to ethnography goes beyond prose to include performance, photography, music, spoken word and visual art.

In her role as artist in residence, Prof. Ulysse seeks to reorient the relationship of art in anthropology and to inspire more creative approaches into the life and work of the AES and the discipline at large. In accepting this position, Ulysse wrote “Starting with the AES spring meeting in April, I look forward to working on infusing the arts in the society and beyond, which is essential to the decolonizing anthropology project.” For more about Prof. Ulysse, please see her interview with Ken Guest here on Ulysse’s trajectory as a creative anthropologist, and visit her website.

Her books include: Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importing, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self Making in Jamaica (Chicago, 2008) and  Why Haiti Needs New Narrative: A Post Quake Chronicle (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) a public anthropology project on her work as a 2009 Op-Ed Project alumn. Her artistic turn is evident in the award-winning Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) a collection of photography, performance texts and spoken word. Her latest book is an abridged compilation A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2023) edited and interviewed by Penelope Papailas is translated in Greek by Vangelis Poulios. Additionally, her poetry, multi-media work and writing have appeared in American Ethnologist, emisferica, Ethnografica, Feminist Studies, Journal of Haitian Studies, Kerb Journal of Landscape Architecture, Gastronomica, Interim Poetics, PoemMemoirStory, Souls, Third Text, Transitions among other venues. She edits the Rasanblaj Section of AnthroNow Magazine.   Between 2022-2023, her visual art and photography was featured on the covers of Frontiers, Feminist Formations, Meridians and Feminist Studies.  Ulysse was an invited artist in the Biennale of Sydney in Australia in 2020.  She has been invited to participate in the Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar, Senegal Spring 2024.