Daphné's Biography

I am Daphné Mia Essiet, an Afropean pluri-disciplinary artist. I express my love for art through music, visual art, and poetry. I grew up in the South of France and moved to the USA in 2004 where I have been residing since then. I studied Audio Engineering at the Institute of Audio Research, and briefly attended City College of New York to study Jazz Performance, before getting a degree in BS in Dietetics. After working corporate for years, I decided to get back into being a full-time artist.

I have always been drawn to words and language. It allowed me to get a more accurate sense of how the world and people around me operate: assigning the perfect term to describe a situation or someone always provides me with a feeling of peace and a sense of accomplishment. As if all of a sudden I had released a tension and aligned myself with a potent truth.

Growing up, I read and appreciated poetry from Baudelaire, De la Fontaine and Verlaine but it wasn’t until I read Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni that, I too, as a woman of a rich ethnical and racial background, thought that I could become a “real” poet. 

I am inspired by Womanhood, Travels, Self-Discovery, and Society. I currently reside in Harlem, New York.