Ruth Jean-Marie – Canarsie

Ruth Jean-Marie is a Brooklyn born woman-child of Haitian immigrants. She is an entrepreneur, creative and freelance writer. She is the Founder of The August Project (TAP) and The August Consulting Group, two organizations that work in tandem to do good, better by engaging in strategic partnerships, storytelling and consulting. Given the gaps in international development work, namely the idea that people of color can’t self-govern, Jean-Marie exposes these issues and corrects them through her work. She has worked with a number of organizations, including Nike, the Haitian American Caucus, Verizon and Lyft and is featured in over 20 publications. 

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Ruth Jean-Marie, interviewed Canarsie residents and leveraging social media to gain insight into intergenerational relationships, and unspoken histories. Her goal was to underscore Haitian dignity, unearth untold stories and memorialize Haitian existence.

Ruth founded The August Project (TAP) to do just that; it is a non-profit that focuses on storytelling and strategic partnerships. TAP’s feature events are conversational salons that focus on strengthening cultural ties, storytelling and creating a greater understanding of different generations’ experiences. For her show, Deye Rèv Geyen Rèv, Ruth stages a performance piece that addressed how the role of silence and maintaining appearances creates a barrier to familial intimacy and questions whether they also serve as an unintentional solution to inherited trauma. For this project, she was able to work with Steven Baboun, Lakou NOU alum and famed photographer. Ruth hopes to continue this work by interviewing Haitians around the world in a coffee table book titled, Black Magic: Stories of Movement.