Berette S Macaulay

Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer whose work spans photography, video, performance, sculpture, and mixed media. Her creative process is experimental and collaborative, blending research, poetry, oral histories, material experimentation, and somatic approaches to explore how memory, identity, and place are embodied.

She is an Afro-Caribbean woman who has lived in a few places, but most recently moved from New York to Washington State nine years ago, swapping the familiar density of concrete for the foreign spaciousness of the evergreen state. Drawing from her multi-im/migrant heritage and lived experiences, Berette approaches her practice as a site for communal inquiry and cultural storytelling. She considers questions of belonging, myth, trans*national identity, and exile as emotional terrains of yearning and desire.  She has exhibited widely, including Metamorphic Return (4Culture, 2024–25), My Oma (Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands, 2023–24), Glow in the Dark (Jacob Lawrence Gallery, 2024), New Dialogues (National Gallery, 2023–24), Migration Stories (Art Alive, India, 2021), and ReKON (Annenberg Space for Photography, 2019). Her works are held in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Jamaica and the International Center of Photography (as ‘SeBiArt’).  Her award-winning experimental short, land.scape notes on exile (2025) is in selection screenings at festivals worldwide, including Cadence Video Poetry Festival and Seattle Black Film Festival in Seattle, the New York African Film Festival at BAM, and Short Way Int’l Festival in São Paulo. 

Berette’s work has been generously supported with grants and residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Seattle Foundation, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, National Performance Network, Jack Straw Cultural Center, CENTRUM, and others. Her commissioned writing spaces include catalogs, editorials, journals, and artist monographs. Publications of her written and visual work include Feminist Media Histories (UC Press), UNESCO Courier, MONDAY Art Journal (UW Press), O Quilombismo Reader (Archive Books/Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin), and Praise House (Archive Books Berlin, 2026). In 2024, she curated the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency exhibition at UW, where she also served as editor and contributor for the artist catalogue Simon Benjamin: A Bolt from the Blue. She was also the commissioned curator for the 2025 Neddy Finalist Exhibition at the Behnke Gallery at Cornish College for the Arts at Seattle University.

From 2021–2023, Berette received the inaugural Curatorial Fellowship at On the Boards, where she developed the socially-engaged work UN-[TITLED]—an immersive collaborative performance and oral history project on gentrification, displacement, and cultural memory in Seattle. The multi-scoped project was performed as site activations in formerly redlined Central and Chinatown Int’l Districts, and includes the publication, Si’ahl ATLAS: A Walking Guide of Community and Cultural Memory. She is also the founder of
Black Cinema Collective, a film programs and regranting initiative dedicated to showcasing global Afrodiasporic cinema, which is housed within her collaborative arts incubator,
i•ma•gine | e•volve ®.  Berette received a BA in Theater Arts from Marymount Manhattan College and MA in Cultural Studies from University of Washington.