Cadet, Widline

Haitian, b.1992

BiographyWidline Cadet is a Haitian-born artist. Her photographs portray her dual identity as a transnational woman and a Black woman. These are complex and layered experiences that Cadet translates by composition and technique. She stages scenes of softness and relationship, duality and autonomy, focusing on the gaze and beauty of Black women of diasporic communities. Cadet draws from her personal history, as she examines memory, migration, erasure, and skin. She examines Haitian cultural identity, as reshaped within the United States. Cadet cues viewers to this blend of experience, through physical patterns and the posing of bodies as well as the choices of material attached to those bodies—such as gingham.
Cadet received the Museum of Contemporary Photography's 2020 Snider Prize first prize. She earned her B.A. in studio art from The City College of New York, and MFA from Syracuse University. Cadet lives and works in Los Angeles.