Tania L. Balan-Gaubert is a conceptual artist, cultural producer, and writer based between Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY) and Shikaawa (Chicago, Illinois). Her practice weaves together personal narrative, diasporic memory, and speculative world-building, moving through histories of displacement and survival while honoring practices of belonging.
Born to Haitian parents on Council of the Three Fires and Miami lands of present-day Illinois, she was raised between Chicago’s South Side and Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood. These geographies continue to shape her artistic practice, which is guided by Haitian, African, and Indigenous traditions. Working across mixed media, installation, photography, painting, and social practice, she assembles found objects, folklore, craft, and spirituality into hybrid forms that move between the material and immaterial. Her work creates spaces where ancestral memory intersects with contemporary experience and where imagination becomes a tool for reclamation and transformation.
Balan-Gaubert has exhibited in Chicago at the Haitian American Museum of Chicago (HAMOC), in New York at Haiti Cultural Exchange (HCX), the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI), the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), CaribBEING House in residence at the Brooklyn Museum, and the Lefferts Historic House in Prospect Park. In San Francisco, her work has been presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), and SOMArts Cultural Center. She has also developed collaborative projects and programs that bring artists and communities into dialogue around migration, memory, and the Caribbean diaspora. Balan-Gaubert is the founder of STR.DST.MRKT. (pronounced Stardust Market), a mobile art studio, gallery, and concept shop that transforms everyday spaces into hubs for creativity and cultural exchange, and serves as the Community Director of FORGOTTEN LANDS, a platform amplifying contemporary Caribbean diasporic voices, illuminating and archiving overlooked narratives through art, culture, and dialogue.
Balan-Gaubert earned her MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, her MA in African American Studies from Columbia University, and her bachelors in Psychology from Earlham College.
