The Haiti Cultural Exchange recently announced the four artists that have been selected for its 2023 Lakou NOU Artists in Residence.
Lakou NOU was launched in 2016 and provides four artists of Haitian descent with the opportunity to create and present new work.
The program aims to connect each artist with one of the four Brooklyn neighborhoods that are home to generations of Haitians and Haitian-Americans, which include: Crown Heights, Canarsie, East Flatbush and Flatbush.
This year’s 2023 Lakou NOU Artists in Residence include Emmanuel Elpenord, Laurena Finéus, Ruth Jean-Marie and Maxine Montilus.
Emmanuel Elpenord
Elpenord is an actor, puppeteer and voice-over artist. He has performed off-Broadway, nationally and internationally with performances in Disney's Winnie The Pooh, the Very Hungry Caterpillar Show and the Drilling Company's Bryant Park Shakespeare.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Coney Island, Elpenord is the son of Haitians from Marchand Dessalines.
Throughout his residency, he plans to produce puppet productions that include Haitian folktales and speak to the values and ideals Haitian elders hope to inspire in youth. For this programming, Elpenord will engage the Haiti-born elders to discuss childhood joys and Krik-Krak memories.
Laurena Finéus
Finéus is a Haitian-Canadian visual artist based in New York. Born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, Finéus is an MFA Candidate at Columbia University (2024).
Her work focuses on the representations of black geographies, maroon ideologies and migratory patterns through painterly, figurative and imagined landscapes. It has been exhibited in several galleries, including:
- Jenkins Johnson (2023)
- Wallach Art Gallery (2023)
- G101 (2022)
- The Ottawa Art Gallery (2021)
- Art mûr (2019)
Additionally, she is the recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler fund (2023), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2022) , the Ottawa Arts Council IBPOC Emerging Artist Award (2022) and the Ineke Harmina Standish Memorial (2019).
Throughout her residency, she will be conducting a series of community workshops with Brooklyn-based migrant organizations.
Each workshop will create a window to explore creative tools as a form of emotional processing. Finéus will also be directly responding with her own works that reflect outcomes of each workshop.
Ruth Jean-Marie
Brooklyn-born, Jean-Marie is an entrepreneur and freelance writer. She is the founder of the August Project (TAP) and the August Consulting Group, two organizations that work in tandem to do good by engaging in strategic partnerships, storytelling and consulting.
Through her work, Jean-Marie aims to expose the gaps in international development work, namely the idea that people of color can't self-govern. She has worked with a number of organizations, including Nike, the Haitian American Caucus, Verizon and Lyft and is featured in over 20 publications.
During her Lakou NOU residency, she will collect and highlight Haitian stories to memorialize our existence.
Maxine Montilus
A well-known choreographer, Montilus has presented work at various institutions, including the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, and Harlem School for the Arts with Haiti Cultural Exchange for their annual Selebrasyon Festival.
Montilus founded MV Dance Project, a dance company that aims to be of service to others through public performances and dance education programming.
Additionally, she presented choreography in Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE’s annual New Traditions Showcase from 2015 to 2017 and held the position of choreographer for several productions, including:
- Opera Orlando’s presentations of George Bizet’s Carmen (April 2021)
- The Secret River (December 2021)
- The Magic Flute (October 2022)
During her residency, she plans to build an immersive choreographic work that incorporates the voices of Haitian youth on the future they would like to see for Haiti.
To produce the works, Montilus plans to host movement workshops and other forms of artistic collaboration with youth from the Haitian Diaspora of Brooklyn.
For more information about the 2023 Lakou NOU Artists in Residence, click here.
