About the Artist

Leila Victorin is a Haitian-American contemporary artist based in Niles, MI. As a homeschooled child raised in upstate New York, Leila spent much of her time creating with objects she’d find around the house or outdoors. Some of her first creative memories were writing and drawing pictures on her dolls, shoes, books, or any surface that could be marked in some way. She fell in love with painting while taking a painting class partially in exchange for her mother teaching at a local school. Leila went on to receive a BFA at Andrews University where she developed her first major portrait series depicting refugees living in Albany, New York in 2012.

While she would change gears academically and complete a Master’s in Speech-Language Pathology, she continued to pursue creative work - collaborating with author Rufaro Musvosvi and Boldstroke Films to bring to life Musvosvi’s Dark Matter Experience at the South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center and South Bend Civic Theater. Over the coming years, she would paint more than 100 portraits of historical and contemporary Black figures. Her large scale portrait murals lead her to be featured on NPR music, Mayhue Magazine, the Crocker Art Museum of Sacramento and later receive the 2021 Beautification Award for her work with the city of Riverside, CA.

Inspired by the works of Kerry James Marshall, Lina Iris Viktor, and Ashley Longshore, her work took a shift at the end of 2021 when she began to take a more personal approach. She created a mini-series featuring the clutter in her home as she prepared to move back across the country, followed by a surrealist collection entitled Beetles in Waiting - Portraits of Calm and Clarity encapsulating the beauty and discomfort of the trauma and change she was experiencing at the time. This series marked a new era in her creative practice where she began to fully allow her creative work to dictate its own meaning and use it as a means to process life experiences that would otherwise be masked by her cheerful exterior. Her current work takes inspiration from some of her earliest childhood memories as well as her work in child development to help make sense of some of the complex emotions surrounding how we process family dynamics and memories.