Awilda Sterling-Duprey

2025 Stepping Stone Grantee

Awilda Sterling-Duprey (b. 1947, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a pioneering Afro-Caribbean multidisciplinary artist whose practice bridges performance, painting, and abstraction through movement and sound. Rooted in Afro-Caribbean ritual, Yoruba cosmology, and jazz improvisation, her work positions the body as an archive of memory, resistance, and spiritual continuity. Trained at Pratt Institute (MFA, 1979), she emerged as a leading voice of the decolonial Caribbean avant-garde, co-founding Pisotón, Puerto Rico’s first experimental dance collective. Her acclaimed series …blindfolded.