Widline Cadet b. 1992

Widline Cadet's practice is rooted in photography and includes video, sound, sculpture, performance, and installation. Her work centers her family’s lived experience of immigrating from Haiti to the United States as source material to explore the complexities of Black diasporic life and survival. 

Curious about her family history and the generation that preceded her, Cadet began to photograph her family members in effort to expand her family’s existing small archive. However, as graduate studies limited her time and access to family, Cadet turned the camera on herself, examining her own inner self and how it had been influenced by her migration. Motifs in her pictures refer to her past, such as sprigs of the bougainvillea that grew around her parental house in Haiti, and gingham dresses modelled after her old school uniform.

As many of Cadet’s relatives do not exist in photographs, Cadet considers her photographs to equally embody someone else. The photographs serve as an intergenerational way of knowing and imaging someone despite never meeting them. 

Widline Cadet (b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Ayiti; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) earned her MFA from Syracuse University after completing her BA in studio art from the City College of New York. She was a 2021–2022 visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and a 2020–2021 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2020, she was a recipient of the NYFA/JGS Fellowship in Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize, and was named a Lit List finalist. She was also a 2019 Syracuse University VPA Turner artist-in-residence, a 2019 Lighthouse Works fellow, and a 2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture artist-in-residence. In 2013, she received the Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship.

Her work has been featured in Aperture Magazine, FOAM, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Financial Times, Frieze, Artforum, and Wallpaper, among others. Cadet has exhibited both in the U.S. and internationally. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; and the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

Cadet’s work is currently on view in Flow States: La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, New York; Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); To Conjure: New Archives in Recent Photography at the International Center of Photography, New York; and Narratives in Focus at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Her work will also be included in the upcoming Liverpool Biennial and Made in L.A. 2025 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Cadet’s first monograph, Ritual [Dis]Appearance / Seremoni disparisyon, published by Black Mountains Studio, will be released in May 2025.