Ellise Barbara is a Montreal-based avant-garde artist, singer-songwriter, and thinker. Rising from artist-run spaces such as La Brique and Drones Club at the turn of the current decade, their recent efforts are centered around LGBTQ community organizing (Taking What We Need, ASTTeQ, African Rainbow). With a band called Elle’s Black Space and a lineup solely made of musicians of Sub-Saharan African descent, Barbara aims to recenter contemporary blackness by rejecting current racialized tropes.