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About
Yoland Skeete, is a documentary photographer, videographer, and an exhibiting multimedia artist. She immigrated with her family to the US as a child, later attended the School of Visual Arts for undergraduate studies in film, video and photography, continued and completed her graduate studies at Tufts University/MIT Graduate program in Anthropological Filmmaking under Jean Rouche, and at Hunter College. She is certified in the business of Arts Administration at Seton Hall University and was an adjunct professor at Rockland Community College, Raritan Valley Community College, New Jersey City University and Rutgers University, Newark until 2009.
She has worked in radio, television, and newspaper, at a time when women and women of color were not allowed in the field. In California, she edited the first multiracial omnigender newspaper in the US for women of color entitled “The Fourth World”, it was funded by Glide Memorial Church, a major art and political funding organization in San Francisco at the time. She co-founded and directed, the Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center in Newark, which was one of Newark’s leading artists run alternative spaces from 1993 to 2015.
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Yoland received awards from the city of Newark for her outstanding cultural contributions and the organization received recognition by New York Foundation for The Arts and New Jersey State Council on the Arts for outstanding arts programming. In 2001, she was commissioned by the Cape May Historical Society, and funded by the New Jersey Council on the Humanities to produce the film documentation of the lost history of African American culture in Cape May, New Jersey. She combined the documentation into a class project for the Cape May high school students involving the students in every aspect of documentary filmmaking from research to postproduction.
Ms. Skeete became involved in the preservation of the Asian American history of the city of Newark through her own Asian roots. She is the author of “When Newark Had a Chinatown”, a historical documentation of the Newark Chinatown that existed in Newark from 1870s to the 1970s, and is published by Dorrance Publishing. She is a contributing member to the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, where her photo documentation of the Chinatown in Havana, Cuba is in their permanent collection. She has worked with Prof John Kuo Wei Tchen, Director and Founder of Asian Pacific American Institute at NYU, where her Newark Chinatown collection is among the permanent archives in NYU Tamiment Library. She has been a recipient of the Glide Memorial Grant, The Graff Travel Grant, The New Jersey Council on the Humanities Grant and the Melon Grant distributed through New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Humanities program. She has been an Artist in Residence at Art in General, The Arts Council of the Essex Area, and has received educational grants and awards for her work with youth and media.
Ms. Skeete has exhibited her video and photography works in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including the Museum of Modern Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, Museum of Contemporary Arts and Crafts in New York City, Biblioteque Nacional de Paris and The Musee & Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris, Husby Konsthalle, Stockholm, Sweden, and Estesio Gallery, Beddingstrande, Sweden and The Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles and recently Zimmerli Museum in New Brunswick, NJ.
Her work has appeared in a major joint exhibition in fall of 2018, winter 2019, at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles and the California Chinese American History Museum. The exhibition entitled Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art has a catalog written by Alexis Chang and was published by Duke University Press. In 2020 her work was exhibited in and published in the catalogs of the 24th Annual Art Ability Exhibition in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and Verum Ultimum Art Gallery in Portland, Or. Her photography works are in the print collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Alexander Bonin Gallery in Chelsea, NY, and American Express Corporation, in African American Museum
of Life and Culture, Dallas, Texas, her sculpture work in the Bilha Museum in Portugal. In 2024, she exhibited in the 15 Bienal de la Habana, Cuba and she will be exhibiting again in Havana in May 2026. Her work will represent the Sankofa celebrations.
The largest collection of her works is in the Zimmerli Museum, New Brunswick, NJ. Yoland Skeete continues to work at her photography and art in her studio daily.