Dimitry Saïd Chamy is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural producer whose work moves between installation, social practice, performance, moving image, and design. Grounded in his Haitian, Lebanese, and American diasporic experiences, his practice creates
systems for collaborative play while exploring what happens when those systems break, adapt, or overflow.
Chamy has been an artist-in-residence at the FETA Foundation, Available Space, the Barnard College Movement Lab with Pioneer Winter Collective, and Design Hi(j)ack in Beijing, where he also exhibited. His work has been presented at Beijing Design Week, New York Fashion Week, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Lowe Art Museum, MIFA, Edge Zones, DORCAM, the New York Public Library, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His experimental short films have screened at festivals internationally.
As a performer and collaborator, Chamy has appeared with Juraj Kojš’s Orchid Adventures, created live visuals for the 2025 Soundologia Anthology Festival and Feria Clandestina IV Opening Party, and created live scenic visuals and designed props for the world premiere of Pioneer Winter Collective’s Apollo, later featured in the New York Times. Other press coverage includes The Miami Herald, WLRN Public Media, PBS Art Loft, Axios, Island TV, and Artburst.
In 2022, Chamy produced and co-curated The BluPrnt Show with Robert Chambers, an exhibition bringing together nearly 400 artists spanning 125 years of Miami art history.
The exhibition was recognized by the New York Times as emblematic of Miami’s historic and global significance in contemporary art. In 2026, he curated What’s My Line? Drawing as Experience for Edge Zones at the Miami Beach Regional Library.
Chamy received an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. He has taught at six universities, received an Erasmus+ Higher Education Mobility Scholarship, and served as Honorary Master’s Review Chair at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga. He is Research Associate Professor and co-founding faculty of the Ratcliffe Art + Design Incubator at Florida International University in Miami, where he maintains his studio and mentors artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs.
My memory palace is more of a lakou. When I draw, it rains / Palè memwa mwen se yon lakou. Lè m desine, lapli tonbe, 2024
Hands to water / Men nan dlo
Dye sublimation print on polyester chenille, 48″ × 72″
Her memory palace is more of a lakou / Palè memwa li se yon lakou
Dye sublimation print on polyester chenille, 96″ × 120″
Sit listen / Chita tande
22 unique floor pillows, dye sublimation print on polyester with polyester filling, sewn seam closure, and white tufted center stitching, each pillow features two hand-drawn vector patterns from the artist’s drawing archive, 26″ x 26”
Palè memwa mwen se yon lakou. Lè m desine, lapli tonbe. My grandmother Mémé was an amazing seamstress. When I was little, she pulled me into her bedroom to show me her treasures. She held out tiny scraps of fabric—perhaps remnants of dresses she had made long ago for my mom and her sister when they were girls. Each was a window into another world infused with the woody moth-balled scent of her fabric trunk. To her, they were memories. To me, portals to worlds I would never know. Today, I can’t picture even one of her fabrics. What I remember is her joy.
My joy comes from drawing as meditation and divination. When I draw patterns, am I tapping into imagination or memory?
The works combined in this installation come from the generative paradox of poorly remembered fragments—joining Mémé is my grandfather Luc
and his garden, and my great-grandmother Yaya’s soft touch and tales of her legendary powers as a healer. I invite you to join me in contemplation, conversation, and respect for the ancestors who dreamed us. My memory palace is more of a lakou. When I draw, it rains
.
