I am committed to preserving Afro-diasporic and indigenous narratives that have historically been marginalized or erased in colonial archives. I weave together colonial archival materials with Afro-syncretic religious traditions to illuminate the collective experiences of African diasporic and indigenous communities.

Yelaine Rodriguez (b. 1990) is an Afro-DominicanYork interdisciplinary artist and scholar focusing on wearable art, sculptures, photography, video installation, and performance. Her work examines Afro-syncretism, ancestral and architectural memory, emphasizing the links between the Caribbean and the United States. Rodriguez earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design | The New School in 2013 and later completed a Master of Arts (MA) in Latin American and Caribbean Studies with a concentration in Museum Studies at New York University (NYU) in 2021. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University.

She has participated in various residencies, including the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) (2017), Wave Hill Van Lier Fellowship (2018), The Latinx Project Curatorial Fellowship at NYU (2019), and the Bronx Museum AIM Program (2020). Rodriguez has exhibited internationally at venues such as ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 at El Museo del Barrio in New York, the first large-scale national survey of Latinx contemporary art, UNTITLED Art Fair, Photoville, The Shed Open Call, and American Museum of Natural History in the United States, Centro León Biennial XXVII in the Dominican Republic, SurGallery and Critical Distance Centre for Curators in Canada, Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands, Documenta 15 in Germany, and Santa Mònica in Barcelona, Spain.

Her curatorial projects include Radical Elegance at Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos (2021), Afro Syncretic at NYU (2019-2020), Resistance, Roots, & Truth at (CCCADI) (2018), and (under)REPRESENT(ed) at Parsons School of Design | The New School (2017). From 2015 to 2018, she founded La Lucha: Dominican Republic and Haiti, One Island, an artist collective dedicated to exploring Dominican-Haitian relations through exhibitions, artist panels, and interactive conferences. Her work has been published in CNN, Artsy, EnFoco, Hyperallergic, Vogue, Aperture, and Elle Magazine. Her writings have also appeared in ARTnews, the academic journal Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture, and A Handbook of Latinx Art, the first anthology dedicated to documenting the significant contributions of Latinx artists to the American art landscape.

Selected Works