Celeta Hickman is a dancer, masquerade, bead artist, and student of Africana Studies with an interest in the West African Art of leadership, functional art, and art societies. Celeta danced professionally with Nego Gato Capoeira Angola, Shades of Black Movement and Legacy Arts Project and is nationally recognized Wolf Trap Program for Early Learning Through the 

Arts teaching artist. She teaches children throughout southwestern Pennsylvania Africana and Afro-Caribbean history, art and dance traditions. Ms. Hickman is an arts educator for the August Wilson Center for African American Culture. She is an accessories and masquerade designer with a popular stationery line called New Village Daughter Papers. Celeta has proudly served as the Afro-Caribbean dance instructor at the Hill Dance Academy twelve years. In 2015 she was one of the local dancers selected to perform with Ronald K. Brown/ Evidence, A Dance Company in their critically acclaimed production “On Earth Together”. 

 

Ms. Hickman worked at the Carnegie Museum of Art as a cataloger and cultural historian for the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive. Her visual and public performance work has been featured at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Media, the Three Rivers Arts Festival First Night, Boom Concepts@the Carnegie Museum of Art, Montage, Penn State University, Contemporary Craft, Concept Galleries, and the North Shore. Celeta is the founder of the Ujamaa Collective in Pittsburgh a wealth building. 

 

She is the artistic director of a series of short films featuring her dense, ornate beadwork, choreography and historical analysis of Africana woman’s leadership aesthetics and Black performance masquerades for her project, “A Black Bead Story: :The Digital Spectacles”.