Biography
Yoland Skeete, Artist and Educator-------------Email: yolandsk@gmail.com
Yoland Skeete, has been a documentary photographer, videographer, and an exhibiting multimedia
artist all her life. 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 newspaper in the US for women of color entitled
“The Third 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. She 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 D'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 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, her sculpture in African American Museum
of Life and Culture, Dallas, Texas, her multimedia work in the Bilha Museum in Portugal. The largest
collection of her works are in the Zimmerli Museum, New Brunswick, NJ. Yoland Skeete continues to work at
her photography and art in her studio daily.