Placemaking12: Havanna Fisher

Havanna Fisher is an emerging transdisciplinary artist and designer from Harlem who works across the fields of design, performing arts and film. She has a keen interest in using her skills and gifts to combine the art world with education to bring about political awareness and thus probable change within the American landscape of ideological identity. Havanna continues to blend different art forms like fashion, dance, and film with an emphasis on community and unity to create a world of many possible approaches to living life and creating a new just society. Check out the bottom of this page for her full bio!

We first met Havanna when she was a teenager and she worked with us to make a film about parks in Northern Manhattan, The Road to Recovery.  She later helped us produce the Domino Effect.  In 2017, she was an urbanist-in-residence and performed The Cotton Series: Birth of a Workforce at the Homeboy Came to Orange book release. 

Havanna Fisher is an emerging transdisciplinary artist and designer from Harlem who works across the fields of design, performing arts and film. She has a keen interest in using her skills and gifts to combine the art world with education to bring about political awareness and thus probable change within the American landscape of ideological identity. She has received both a BFA in Fashion Design from Parsons New School for design and a BA in the Arts with a concentration in dance from Eugene Lang College. Havanna continues to blend different art forms like fashion, dance, and film with an emphasis on community and unity to create a world of many possible approaches to living life and creating a new just society.

Her work reaches into the realms of organizing and teaching;  participating in several projects, organizations, and coalitions moving to produce a stronger community and a better world. A few of these organizations are The University of Orange, Community Voices Heard, 400 Years of Inequality, Parsons Scholars Program, Harlem Children’s Zone and Grownswell. She co-founded Sisters Art Solan (SAS), a student organization that is geared towards women of color artists.

Havanna was the Harlem artist resident for 2016 at The Laundromat Project in which she creates a community stop motion project called “Harlem Motion”. Harlem Motion created a healing space where conversations around the effects of gentrification were discussed by community members of old and new. She has shown her designs on “Sisters on the Runway” and teaches high school Harlem teens how to use fashion as a social identity maker. She has presented work, BAAD!ASS Women Festival, The University of Orange, The New School’s Centennial Celebration and twice at Judson Church. Havanna’s most recent current project is called “The Cotton Series” which debuted at Movement Research at Judson Church in fall 2017. The Cotton Series is a collection of dance works that explores Black women’s lives as they live in America and how their sisterhood supports their survival.

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