Gina Athena Ulysse was born in Pétion-Ville, Haiti. In 2005, when she became a U.S. citizen, she gave herself the name Athena. She is the middle child of three sisters-- who had migrated to the East Coast of the United States in their early teens. Her family has lived somewhere around there ever since.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she is also a poet/performer and multi-media artist. She has been teaching since she earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1999. It was during the early years of her graduate career that Ulysse began to seriously actively perform in part to pursue a childhood dream of wanting to be a singer and to ground herself and allow her creative spirit to breathe through this restructuring process that threatened to desensitize her.

Spokenword became her chosen medium. She deploys it to both explore and push the blurred border zones between ethnography and performance. She considers these works “alter(ed)native” forms of ethnography constructed out of what she calls “recycled ethnographic collectibles” (raw bits and pieces that seem too personal or trivial) through which she engages with the visceral that is embedded, yet too often absent, in structural analyses. Her ultimate aim with such works is to access/face and recreate a full and integrated subject without leaving the body behind. An interdisciplinary scholar-artist, Ulysse weaves history, statistics, personal narrative, theory, with Vodou chants to dramatize and address issues of social (in)justice, intersectional identities, spirituality and the dehumanization of Haitians and other marked bodies. With her performance work, she seeks to outline, confront and work through the continuities and discontinuities in the unprocessed horror of colonialism. Or to put it another way, Ulysse explores the complex ways the past functions in the present and is disavowed as both Michael-Rolph Trouillot and Sibylle Fischer have aptly put in Silencing the Past and Modernity Disavowed.

A dynamic performer, described by artist Evan Bissell as “a powerhouse and a whirling storm,” Ulysse has performed variations of her one-woman show “Because When God is too Busy: Haiti, me and THE WORLD” at conferences, in colleges and universities throughout the United States (including City University, Claremont Graduate University, Hunter College, University of Albany, University of Miami, University of Michigan, University of Santa Barbara, Wesleyan University and Yale University) and abroad as well as Bluestockings bookstore, The Bowery, Brecht Forum, Brooklyn Museum, LaMaMa, Lyric Stage Theatre in Boston, Center Stage in Santa Barbara, among other spaces.