Dr. Antoinette Ellis-Williams is Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at New Jersey City University. She teaches courses on Black Womanhood; Diversity & Difference; Women’s Lives; Women & Leadership; Women, Hip-Hop & Social Change; Urban Men of Color; and Race, Class, Gender Activism.
Ellis- Williams is an emerging, Jamaican born, multi-media interdisciplinary abstract contemporary artist, playwright, scholar, and poet. Her work comes from a deeply spiritual place. Antoinette’s ability to masterfully use storytelling in her art is reminiscence of an ancestral trait. She weaves familiar and unfamiliar narratives with abstract marks and lines to create vibrant kaleidoscopic works of art. Through her stories, she builds a shared global community, while allowing us to examine our past, present and future. An advocate for women, she uses history, politics, culture, and imagination to tell their stories. Her work is a commentary on injustice and the textured lives of marginalized people. She creates as a way of unpacking rage, pain, contradictions, beauty, agency, and joy, while constantly trying to understand the complex history and narrative of blackness in the United States and black the diaspora.
Ellis-Williams’ creative process is based on layering, recycling, reimagining, and mixing media. Mixed media abstract collaging is at the heart of the process. Constantly searching beneath layers for hidden messages and light, she pushes and dances with all media. She digitizes her oil, acrylic & mixed media work to create new digital colleges.
In 2023 she participated in an artist residency with Global Art Project in Leece, Italy. Dr. Ellis’ public art is in two spaces in Newark Airport Terminal A (Main area and United Airlines Club Lounge) and has also appeared in the Newark Artist Collaboration with Audible. She has had solo exhibitions at the Akwaaba Gallery, Visual Art Gallery at NJCU and Moody-Jones Gallery. Her work has appeared at Newark Museum of Art, NJ State Museum, Morristown Performing Arts Center with Art in the Atrium, Consulate General of Greece in NYC, Akwaaba Gallery, Museum of Science, and Industry in Chicago, Ill, Prizm Art Fair, Calabar Gallery and many other venues.
Dr. Ellis is part of the Womb of Violet collective. Her work is in Volume I & II. “In the first volume of A Womb of Violet: An Anthology, the risograph artbook served as a medium to bring together Black women living in Newark to have discussions about womanhood and reckoning with self. We reflect on our lived experiences, the ebbs of solitude and isolation, the complexity and simplicity of Black life’s importance and cultivate ideas of a future where we thrive.” https://www.wombofviolet.com/contributors-1
She is the author of Black Gardenias: A Collection of Poems, Stories, & Sayings from A Woman’s Heart (Semaj Publishing, 2013). Her work has appeared in Scoundrel Time Magazine, When Women Speak Anthology, Tribes 16, to name a few. She has performed at the Bowery Poetry Club, When Women Speak Podcast, and many open mics. She is a playwright and actor of Scarf Diaries. Her one-woman play premiered at NJPAC in 2017 and at reg. e gaines’ 2021 Downtown Urban Art Festival in NYC. Scarf Diaries won BEST play. Ellis-William’s documentary Lee Hagan: Connecting Generations (2016) won best short documentary at the Newark Black Film Festival. Her TedX Talk Finding Justice in the Land of the Free (2015) tried to unpack her immigrant status in America. She has presented papers at Oxford, Harvard, Rutgers, Seton Hall, Princeton, United Nations, to name a few. She is a highly sought after public speaker and minister. She is a member of the Zonta Club of Essex, board of trustees for the New Jersey Institute of Social Justice, Women@NJPAC and the Blue-Ribbon National Committee for Civic Influencers.
Dr. Ellis-Williams earned her Ph.D Public Policy & Urban and Regional Planning, Cornell University. She is a graduate of Seton Hall University (BA), University of Pittsburgh (MPA) and Cornell University (Ph.D.). Ellis-Williams is a minister. She says, “I hope to trigger conversations that help to transform communities, heal, and empower people.”
