Odessa
Ocean

Odessa Ocean is a Queer Afro-Caribbean artist born in the U.S. and raised in Antigua. Their work moves through a diasporic body where joy and grief carry equal weight, each necessary to hold the human together. As a descendant of slavery, Ocean understands the equilibrium can look murky between them both — yet it is not something given, but something fought for.

Working with fiber, analog collage, and short film as acts of archival reconstruction, Ocean builds from fragments of what is remembered, what is withheld, what refuses to disappear. Braiding hair, textiles, and found imagery become sites of return. Their practice insists that joy is not separate from grief, but braided within it.

Their work has been featured at Canada Gallery, the New York LGBTQ Center, Textile Arts Center, Paper Mill Playhouse, and Antigua & Barbuda Art Week since 2022. Their short film The Lost Tapes of Antigua 2029 screened at the Newark Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Luminal Theater in 2024. Ocean is a recipient of the Sakia Gunn Fellowship, through which they created a short film on the tension within a Caribbean lesbian love story, presented at the 2025 Newark LGBTQ Film Festival.

In 2026, Ocean expands their practice into public, interactive installations merging video and collage to create immersive spaces of remembrance. They choose to honor those lost, understanding that we are ancestors in progress. Their work holds memory as both resistance and offering — making visible what has been buried, and insisting it be felt, carried, and preserved.