Latil Willis is a Chicago-based cultural researcher, artist, and community practitioner interested in what we inherit beyond what can be named. Her work traces the ways African and diasporic creative traditions carry memory, shape identity, and hold possibilities for connection and collective healing across generations.
Her practice moves between research, visual storytelling, public programming, and participatory experience. Since 2023, Willis has developed recurring Pan-African cultural programming that brings history into conversation with contemporary Black life. She has produced and facilitated public experiences around cultural memory, mental health, and intergenerational dialogue. Her creative research looks toward African and diasporic material and visual culture, asking what becomes possible when ancestral knowledge is not treated as something fixed in the past, but as something living that can be encountered, interpreted, and made new.
At the center of her practice is a question: What helps people see themselves, one another, and their place in the world more clearly? She approaches curating as one way of holding space for that seeing. For her, an exhibition is not simply a place where art is displayed, but a site of convergence where art, memory, people, and ideas meet, and where new ways of seeing can emerge.
Latil holds a B.A. in Advertising from Columbia College Chicago and is a TEDxColumbiaCollegeChicago speaker. Her background in visual communication informs an enduring fascination with the ways images, objects, stories, and spaces shape what we understand about ourselves and one another.
