Please join Esery Mondesir for a conversation with writer and art critic James Oscar and scholar Vermonja Alston This program is held in conjunction with the exhibition Esery Mondesir: We Have Found Each Other.

Esery Mondesir is a Haitian-born video artist and filmmaker. He was a high school teacher and a labour organizer before receiving an MFA in cinema production from York University (Toronto) in 2017. Mondesir’s work draws from personal and collective memory, official archives and vernacular records, and the everyday to generate a reading of our society from its margins. His films and video work have been exhibited in Canada and internationally. Mondesir currently lives in Toronto.

James Oscar is a writer, art critic, and anthropological researcher. He studied closely under the direction of poet Édouard Glissant at CUNY Graduate Center. He is presently researching the sociology and anthropology of art at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique. He has been on the curatorial advisory team at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' "From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-Face Picasso, Past and Present." He recently curated at the Momenta Biennale de la Photo (Fall 2021). He is a regular public lecturer and moderator of panel discussions, most recently Pop Montreal, Institute of Australian Geographers & New Zealand Geographical Society, MOMUS Magazine, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, The Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, The Power Plant, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He has been named Curator in Residence for 2022 at the Darling Foundry Contemporary Art Centre.

Vermonja R. Alston is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University where she teaches African American, Caribbean, and African Literature and Cinema.  She earned an interdisciplinary doctorate in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies, minoring in Anthropology, from the University of Arizona in 2004, a Master of Liberal Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, a Juris Doctor degree from Boston University in 1982, and an AB in Psychology from Brown University in 1978. Vermonja’s field research on early twentieth-century African American travels in the Americas has taken her to Haiti, Belize, and Brazil. A SSHRC travel grant allowed Vermonja to present her paper, “Those Drums Got to Me: Toward a Theory of Kinesthetic Empathy and Embodied Cosmopolitanism of Katherine Dunham” at a Latin American Studies Association Conference in Rio de Janiero.