Sherwin Ovid is a visual artist born in Trinidad who earned his bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a Lincoln Fellow in 2013 at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he received his MFA. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University. His work in painting and drawing aims to create visual spaces that confront the assumed neutrality of seeing, experience and the colonial histories that regulate who or what belongs in designated spaces. While he makes use of rationaL geometry with multiple stencils, he upends it with improvisational gestures of poured slow drying liquid mediums that create surprising, unexpected results. These contrasting mixtures create their own vortexes and undulating waves using references based on recurring visual patterns in architectural walls, and ocean currents.

His commercial endeavors include collaborations with Lee Daniel’s Netflix feature The Deliverance, Lena Waithe’s Showtime drama The Chi, and Jordan Peele’s Monkey Paw Studio remake of Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta. Ovid has exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery, 6018North, Agitator gallery, Randy Alexander Gallery, Goldfinch Gallery, Gallery 400, Prison Neighborhood Arts Project, Humboldt Park Boathouse Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Cleve Carney Art Gallery at College of DuPage, Julius Caesar Gallery, Iceberg Projects in Evanston and the Haitian American Museum of Chicago. He was published in 2020 listed as one of New City Magazine’s breakout artist, New American Painters in 2016 and 2021 as a noteworthy feature, and published in The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film in 2025.