Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times

Sheena Rose is a contemporary artist whose practice involves mixed and new media, including animation, drawing, painting, performance and video.

She lives and works in Barbados, West Indies. Rose is a Fulbright Scholar and earned a BFA Honors degree, in addition to a MFA from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The nature and meaning of contemporary identity, particularly her Caribbean identity, is one of Rose’s major themes. In drawings such as Town and Crowd, and in her paintings and animation, she continues to explore who people are at any given moment, in any given place.

Rose was awarded a number of international artist residencies, and has exhibited her work throughout the United States, as well as internationally in South America, Canada, Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Prestigious art institutions, for example the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (aka “MoCADA”), Queens Museum in New York; and Turner Contemporary in Kent, England have exhibited her work.

In 2017, Rose performed her work “Island and Monster” at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts, London. Her performance was developed in response to sketches that she has making to express her conflicted feelings of belonging and displacement, which emerged with her return to the Caribbean after completing an MFA in North Carolina. To reckon with her changing relationship to her home, Sheena became both the island and the monster, looking in from outside as a way to negotiate this return. Also in 2017, she performed “Island and Monster” at MoCADA in New York City. https://dsmpublicartfoundation.org/artist/sheena-rose/