Lunise Cerin. (Photo by Tafari Robertson; provided by Cerin)

Lunise Cerin is a Haitian-American filmmaker, educator, and cultural worker rooted in both Philadelphia and Port-au-Prince. She spent her formative years in Haiti before returning to the city at age 16.

Nearly two decades later, Cerin has built around 14 years of experience in her multidisciplinary filmmaking practice. Her early work was shaped by seven years at Black&Sexy TV, where she served as a writer, director, editor, and producer, creating web series centered on all things Black, like love, life, history, and the like.

After spending a year in Haiti as a video editor, she went on to earn an MFA in Screenwriting from Columbia University in 2024.

Cerin’s recent works explore Haitian traditions. Victorine is a dance-driven short narrative that examines Haitian-American spiritual inheritance and Vodou tradition through magical realism. Miwa is an ongoing documentary following Haitian cultural traditions across Haiti and the diaspora, accompanied by an exhibition at the Icebox at Crane Arts in South Kensington.

Her work is animated by love for her communities: Black people globally, the Haitian diaspora, Queer Black Philadelphia, and “people who are ready to dream of something new, something better.”

Beyond filmmaking, Cerin channels this love through a deep commitment to community-centered cultural work. She hosts and facilitates collaging and writing workshops across the city.

She describes these workshops as “art therapy as play.” During these sessions, participants access deeper parts of themselves — their dreams, values, memories, or “inner landscapes,” as she calls them.

Through creative prompts, participants in her workshops explore ancestral connections and collective dreaming. Cerin will bring the Ancestors of Your Wildest Dreams guided collage workshop to the Coleman Library (68 W. Chelten Ave.) this Saturday, April 11, from 2–4 p.m.

Ahead of the event, Germantown Info Hub chatted with Cerin about the workshop and her broader practice. 

Please note that some of the entirety of this interview has been shortened for length.

Q: How did you get into the practice of collaging?

A: I have been collaging my whole life. I used to do digital collaging on paint—making little collages of my favorite R&B album covers. I remember making one when President Obama became president—a compilation of 500 photos of Obama. It was weird but exciting. Then it turned into vision boarding, where I would dream of what I wanted with collaging. During the pandemic, I was really getting into tarot and trying to give myself a way in. I tried to understand the cards with collaging by pulling images to understand them for myself. That’s where this latest iteration of collaging as a tool for intuitive practices, healing, and community sharing came from.

Q: Do you ever find yourself doing collaging from the other disciplines you’re holding, like writing and filmmaking? Are they connected in any way? 

A: Not yet, although I think they’re very conversant. I’m a video editor and think of editing as a form of collaging. I have used some of my collages as inspiration for things I’ve written. The collages are like they’re whispering about something going on in the back of your brain. Sometimes it comes out as a collage first, and then you’re like, “Oh, this is about XYZ,” and that sparks an interest that I’ll chase down more with writing.

Q: A lot of the collaging practice that you share with folks is centered around dreaming. Why is that important, and why is that a necessary part of the practice?

A: I think that dreaming is world-building. We desperately need a new world. If we get to be in the practice of dreaming in low-stakes community spaces, that’s important. Last month, I hosted an event called “Bloom” and invited my friend Dominique Matti, a poet, to bring in prompts and poems about softness and calling ourselves back to ourselves after the long winter. Some prompts were like “What did you endure to get here?” and “What will be revealed as the light increases?” and “What expression of yourself insists upon emerging now?” It’s a lot around healing and community, intention, and what we need to be doing together. When I’m hosting these spaces, I have an agenda—to get us to do some important kind of thinking together.

Q: The library is helping make histories with the Hyperlocal Heritage grant. How do you see these workshops playing a part in this wider movement to make histories together in communities? And why is the practice of collaging or any kind of preservation or cultural work important right now? 

A: It’s a great question. People don’t necessarily understand collaging as preservation work, especially because we’re cutting up things in one intended iteration and bringing them into a different form. But it absolutely is, if not preservation, at least a conversation continuing with these images, which I think is important for us to stay in conversation with history, with the artists that came before us and their expressions, and to continue to learn from each other. 

Hosting these spaces for folks to continue to learn alongside each other and from the archive is imperative. I feel it’s really important right now that we are dreaming and giving language to our imagination and other ways of thinking about what this world holds for us.

I think crafting gives us another way to access certain knowledge. When you have images and can move them around, it gives us another way to access memory, dreams, and things that are dormant that we aren’t talking about readily. We think we don’t know or care or have much to say about, but suddenly, because you see a picture of a little girl and a tree, you’re remembering or dreaming and giving language to something you didn’t give much attention to. Spaces that allow people to do that are important right now because we’re inside a really weird time, and we need every tool we can get to remember ourselves.

Q: As we orient towards history and building futures, there seems to be a disconnect between people looking to their past to inform the future. Why is it important to tap into memory to continue building new futures?

A: Because how do we know what we got right and what we got wrong before? It’s not about reinventing the wheel or creating something that didn’t exist. It’s about correcting our mistakes and learning.

“This felt good. This was important to us as a people. This is what stuck with me.”

These are the values, the dreams, and then building on that moving forward. All the opportunities to help us remember what was important to us and to those who came before us are really important to center right now as a jumping off point, as opposed to just looking at what’s hot.

[Artificial Intelligence] is real hot right now, but it will have you thinking that we can’t, or we couldn’t, or we never have been able to do things for ourselves. But that’s what Black people have been doing this entire time.

Imagine Your Ancestors: Guided Collage Workshop is part of Hyperlocal Heritage Grant-funded programming at the Joseph E. Coleman Library, here in Germantown. Lead support is provided by the William Penn Foundation and the Funders Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial.

Rasheed Z. Ajamu is Germantown Info Hub‘s engagement reporter. Their work blends service journalism with a place-based lens, tracking how local policy, development, arts + culture, and neighborhood institutions shape neighbors’ everyday lives. They’re also invested in community archiving and public media projects that help neighbors preserve and share Germantown stories.