Carmelle Beaugelin Caldwell

Carmelle Beaugelin Caldwell is an interdisciplinary artist and visual theologian whose work explores migration as lived collective memory and spiritual experience. A daughter of Haitian émigrés, Beaugelin turns to the familial archives of the women in her family as sacred text, tracing the interior journey of Afro-Haitian diasporic identity alongside its physical realities. Her paintings emerge from a framework she calls imaginoire: a Black femme theological imagination through which the interior life is understood as continuously expanding, deconstructing, and reconstructing — driven by the search for liberation and the ancestral, spiritual, and political forces that carry it forward.

Working across acrylic, oil, and mixed media, Beaugelin builds layered compositions in which lines, spheres, and fragmentary figures seek to make visible the cosmic realities of migration. She invites ritual into her practice through spices and herbs rooted in Haitian herbalism, an inherited family tradition that she is interested in offering a material presence in her work.

Beaugelin earned a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, where she is currently the 2025–2026 Artist in Residence and Visiting Scholar at the Overseas Ministries Study Center. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Interfaith America and Duke University and has been commissioned for national liturgical collections. She is the founder of BeauFolio Studio and Vice-Chair of the Board of Artworks Trenton.