about isissa

Isissa is a mixed-media artist, designer, and maker working primarily in clay, on paper, and with space. She crafts tools and experiences that support living at the pace of presence as a strategy for personal and collective liberation. Her work dwells in the liminal — those in-between states where transformation quietly unfolds, deeply informed by both the challenges and the gifts of her mixed-race and Afro-Caribbean identities.

Her practice has been honored with fellowships, grants, and residencies from Penland School of Craft; Artists’ Literacies Institute; the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA); Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts; Township 10; and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Her work has been exhibited nationally.

Previously, Isissa served as Exhibitions Director at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, and as Exhibitions Manager and Designer for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Today, exhibition design is a central channel of her creative work. She collaborates with museums and cultural institutions to shape immersive storytelling spaces that invite thoughtful engagement with Black creativity, histories, and cultures.

Isissa currently makes art and home in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She enjoys meditating, woodworking, and meandering in nature’s rhythms — rituals that nourish presence, foster attunement to beauty, and continually return her to what truly matters.

artist statement

As a multidisciplinary artist, my practice lives at the intersection of art, design, craft, and collective healing. I create tools, objects, and spaces that facilitate processes of change. My ceramic ritual vessels, works on paper, artist books, and contemplative spaces guide journeys into the in-between states where possibility and potential arise. By working across mediums, I offer diverse paths for slowing down, reflection, and personal transformation.

I design practical tools, visual teachings, and intimate experiences to hold us spiritually, emotionally, and creatively. As an exploration of my mixed-race, queer Black identity and personal history, my pieces bring speculative ancestral and futuristic practices into the present, and embody the struggles and beauty of occupying a third space that is all their own. Through a language of punchy colors and stark neutrals, simple symbols with nuanced implications, and varied textures, my work integrates opposites — bold and delicate, playful and elegant, whimsical and minimal. I assemble fragments to form a unified whole.

As craft, each work expands notions of ‘functional ware’ by advocating for our needs beyond the physical. In space, I create moments of possibility and investigation. I offer my work as an invitation for healing, wholeness, and liberation as a practice.