Michaëlle Sergile, (b. 1995, Chicago, IL ; lives and works in Montreal, CA) holds a BFA from UQÀM (2018) and an MFA from Concordia University (2023). Her work has been exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Off Biennale de Dakar. Her name was also on the long list of the prestigious Sobey Award for the Arts in 2022. In 2023, she won Visual Artist of the Year at the Gala Dynastie and began a residency at the Darling Foundry. In 2024 she exhibited her work at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Gallery 44 (Toronto), the McCord Stewart Museum (Montreal) and was a finalist for the Pierre-Ayot Award. In 2025 she had a residency at the Lottozero Centre (Italy), the Icelandic Textile Centre (Iceland) and exhibited at the Centre Culturel Canadien de Paris (Paris). In 2026, she presented her solo exhibition And Then, Perhaps, a Memory at the Centre of Contemporary Image VOX.

​​

Art Practice​

​

My work explores the histories of Black communities through postcolonial archives, placing the experiences of Afrodescendant women at the center of my research. Using weaving, a medium traditionally associated with women’s domestic practices, I examine the power dynamics tied to gender and race. I am particularly interested in what Saidiya Hartman calls “archival violence”, the ways in which certain lives are omitted, minimized, or silenced in the historical record. Through my practice, I seek to (re)imagine and (re)construct these narratives, translating research into installations and immersive works.

 

My research extends across the Americas, tracing the movements of Black women between Haiti, Canada, and the United States. By engaging with shared diasporic archives, I explore how memory, language, and identity circulate across borders and generations. My textile practice now extends into video and installation, where materials and space become tools to think through history.

 

Architecture and domestic space are recurring motifs in my recent works. By referencing vernacular structures from Haiti and North America, I reflect on how built environments hold memory, how the walls, textures, and patterns of a place can mirror histories of migration and belonging. Witnessing the ongoing destruction of monuments and archives in Haiti, where I spent part of my childhood, I feel an urgency to think critically about how cultural heritage is preserved and transmitted.

 

I see my work as an active form of re-archiving. Through weaving and spatial installation, I aim to create new ways of holding memory, ways that resist erasure and center the complexity of diasporic narratives. Each thread, each fragment of wood or image, becomes part of a larger gesture: a reassertion of presence and belonging.

​