Elyan Jeanine Hill is an interdisciplinary scholar of African arts. Her research interests include festival arts, religious materiality, Black feminisms, and embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Haiti, and their diasporas. Her first book, Spirited Choreographies: Ritual, Sacred Art, and History-Making (under contract with Duke University Press), engages with narratives of migration featured in ritual performances and festival events by Ewe communities in coastal regions of Ghana and Togo. To understand these fraught narratives of forced and free regional dispersal, the book traces practices honoring water spirits and a pantheon of slave spirits called Mama Tchamba, or “grandmother slave.” The book frames the body as an altar, a living archive of accumulated objects and adornments. These lavish embodiments illustrate the interplay of performers’ identities with the objects and images through which religious communities fashion transoceanic and interethnic dialogues.
At Yale, Hill will develop a second project that redefines Atlantic African women’s masquerade based on partial concealment, diasporic practice, and ritual adornment. This new project compares Ewe bodily inscriptions used in festival performances to the work of Brooklyn-based Haitian artist Fabiola Jean-Louis in her photo series Rewriting History. Hill’s written work has been featured in African Arts, Africa, Art Journal, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, and in the edited volume Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas. She has received fellowships and grants from the Fowler Museum, the West African Research Association (WARA), the Africana Research Center at Penn State, the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Women’s Studies and Religion Program at Harvard University. She is currently assistant professor of African and African diaspora art history at Southern Methodist University.