O'Neil Lawrence

O’Neil Lawrence, the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Assistant Curator, is an emerging curator and artist, and a key figure in contemporary Jamaican photography. He is an honours graduate of both the University of the West Indies (English Literature and Sociology) and the EMC (Visual Communication). He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies at UWI.

A trained photographer; O’Neil Lawrence has been exhibiting since 2004 his most recent showings have been in Entre Vues Photographie Contemporaine en Caraibe (2009) at La Fondation Clement, Martinique, and Rockstone and Bootheel (2009) at Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut. His photographic work questions the New World experience and what it means to be Jamaican. Because of this, issues related to Africa, slavery, the Middle Passage as well as the contemporary social mores they created in Jamaica, all figure in his work.

He has recently become a curator at the NGJ and has been part of the curatorial team for Edward Lucie-Smith: 40 Photographs (2010), Young Talent V (2010) and Bogle: A Contest of Icons (2010) at the NGJ. He recently co-curated Shot in Kingston: The Digital Scene (2010), with Christopher Cozier at Alice Yard in Port of Spain.