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Dr. Antoinette Ellis-Williams is Chair and Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at New Jersey City University. She is an emerging Jamaican born multi-media interdisciplinary abstract, contemporary collage artist, playwright, and poet. Her work explores the layers of her own identity—blackness, girl/womanhood, mother, and immigrant. Antoinette is a recipient of the 2023-2024 Newark Artist Accelerator Grant. Her project Red Dirt & Pot Liquor: Tracing Legacy & Memory of Black Women is a storytelling archival project. RDPL will collect and archive audio stories from Black women elders 60+ from the Newark area.

Her public art is in Newark Airport Terminal A and has also appeared in the Newark Artist Collaboration with Audible.  She has had solo exhibitions at the 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, St. Elizabeth University, Consulate General of Greece in NYC, Akwaaba Gallery, Museum of Science, and Industry in Chicago, Ill, Prizm Art Fair, Tribes 16 magazine among others.  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.