Sheena Rose

Sheena Rose is a contemporary artist whose practice involves mixed and new media, including animation, drawing, painting, performance and video.

She lives and works in Barbados, West Indies. Rose is a Fulbright Scholar and earned a BFA Honors degree, in addition to a MFA from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The nature and meaning of contemporary identity, particularly her Caribbean identity,  is one of Rose’s major themes.  In drawings such as Town and Crowd, and in her paintings and animation, she continues to explore who people are at any given moment, in any given place.

Rose was awarded a number of international artist residencies, and has exhibited her work throughout the United States, as well as internationally in South America, Canada, Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Prestigious art institutions, for example the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (aka “MoCADA”), Queens Museum in New York; and Turner Contemporary in Kent, England have exhibited her work.

In 2017, Rose performed her work “Island and Monster” at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts, London. Her performance was developed in response to sketches that she has making to express her conflicted feelings of belonging and displacement, which emerged with her return to the Caribbean after completing an MFA in North Carolina. To reckon with her changing relationship to her home, Sheena became both the island and the monster, looking in from outside as a way to negotiate this return.  Also in 2017, she performed “Island and Monster” at  MoCADA in New York City.

In 2019, she created a two-story mural at the Inter-American Development Bank Headquarters located in Washington, DC. She also created a large-scale mural for an exhibition called “The Other Side of Now” at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami (aka PAMM), Florida.

Rose has been the recipient of a number of international artist’s residencies and her work has also been included in a number of Art Fairs, Film Festivals and Auctions such as  Prizm Art Fair, Third Horizon Film Festival and Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation Auction- Art for Life.

Rose’s work is also featured on the cover of three books, Small Axe 43, “See Me Here,” Robert and Christopher Publishers and in 2015 her work graced the cover of Naomi Jackson’s book “The Star Side of Bird Hill”. Huffington Post and E People Magazine voted that cover one of the best book covers for the year 2015.

 Sheena has been featured in the New York  Times, Huffington Post, Travel & Leisure Magazine, and Vogue. In 2018, Sheena created poster artwork for the play “Emma and Max”, written and directed by Todd Solondz. In 2019, She  created a  two story mural at the Inter- American Development Bank Headquarters in Washington DC.Sheena also created nine feet tall women mural for an exhibition called “The Other Side of Now” in the Perez Art Museum Miami.

Sheena Rose is also known for her  art presence on social media.

Her resume includes a listing of her honors, solo and group exhibitions, artist residencies, performances, publications, and projects.