BERETTE S MACAULAY

Berette S Macaulay is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, photographer, and writer from Jamaica and Sierra Leone, with a working background as an actor, contemporary dancer, make-up artist, lighting & sound designer. Her research and visual arts practices engage themes of be/longing, identity-performance, illegibility, love, memory, and mythmaking.

She earned her BA in Theatre Arts at Marymount Manhattan College and her MA in Cultural Studies at University of Washington and has exhibited and published nationally and internationally, receiving Artist Grants from the Vermont Studio Center Residency, Shunpike Arts, and 4Culture. Art and writing publications include Feminist Media Histories (UC Press), UNESCO Courier, Ebony, Of Note, and Museé magazines, UW College of Arts & Sciences Perspectives, Black Arts Seattle and World Policy Journals.

Her curatorial work includes illusive self (2013) at Taller Boricua Gallery, NYC, Exploring Passages in the Black Diaspora (2020) at Photographic Center NW, and most recently SHAPESHIFTERS – a film program for Black Refractions (2021) at Frye Art Museum, and the permanent exhibition Mystic of a Woman on Rita Marley’s life, now at the Bob Marley Museum. She was the creator and organizer of the MFON in Seattle (2019/2020) program in which she facilitated exhibition partnerships with MFON Women, Frye Art Museum, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and PCNW, continuing the legacy work of Adama Delphine Fawundu and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn to feature 19 Black women photographers from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America.

Berette was named an Ottenberg-Winans Fellow for African Studies (UW 2019) and is the recipient of the 2020 Champion of Seattle Arts (COSA) Award. She received the Simpson Center Research Cluster Grant (2019) as founder of Black Cinema Collective (BCC) where she hosts screenings, watch parties, and panel discussions alongside co-organizers Savita Krishnamoorthy and Chile Dulce, focusing on African and Afro-Diasporic films.

Recent programs she curated with BCC and community partners are HOME: Stories of be/Longing with Wa Na Wari, and Black Spatial Elegance: New Cinematic Language of Global Black Music with Wa Na Wari, Langston, the Henry, and SIFF. BCC programs are supported by institutional grants including 4Culture Arts Project, Redmond Arts, and the Seattle Foundation. It functions as a project of i.ma.gine | e.volve, an interdisciplinary arts incubator for public projects which Berette has been tending to since 2010. Berette previously served as UW Professor & Art Liaison Program Manager at Henry Art Gallery, and is a 2022 Jack Straw Program Support Artist, and Creation & Development Grant co-recipient with artist Tom Pearson from the National Performance Network, for the On the Boards Curatorial project proposal [UN-TITLED].