Stilted Stories: Moko Jumbie Seminar and Performance with Pixel Heller

Witness the resilience, reverance,and resistance embedded in Caribbean tradition.

In the second half of Stilted Stories: Moko Jumbie experience, multidisciplinary artist and Moko Jumbie Pixel Heller will explore the history and cultural legacy of the Moko Jumbie across the Disapora. In this seminar style lecture, Pixel take us on a journey through their personal connection to this tradition while tracing its evolution across time and geography, from its West African origins to its vibrant presence in Caribbean Carnival today.

This seminar will conclude with a performance by Pixel as they invite us to consider how movement becomes memory, and how cultural practices like stilt-walking continue to shape and sustain identity across generations.

About the Lecturer & Performer

Pixel Heller is a multidisciplinary artist, international performer, and Moko Jumbie based in Toronto. Her work explores Afro-Caribbean identity through performance, visual art, and movement. As the founder of Northern Jumbies, she brings the spirit of the Moko Jumbie to life through stilt-walking workshops, performances, and community engagement rooted in ancestral tradition and contemporary expression. She graduated from OCAD University in 2024 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Cross-Disciplinary Studies with a specialization in Life Studies. 

Pixel’s work reimagines ancestral narratives within a contemporary framework, bridging past and present. Through masquerade, she explores the resilience and evolution of Black culture, shaping costume, sculpture, and performance into reflections of history and acts of resistance. Her practice serves as both an homage and a reinvention, an ongoing dialogue that honours the endurance of Black identity while inviting new possibilities for the future. Pixel has exhibited at The Robert McLauchlin Gallery, Gallery 44, MCA Gallery, Meridian Arts Center, Gallery 1313 and internationally at the Black Brazil Art Biennial. She has artwork in The Wedge Collection and won the OCAD U Medal for Cross-Disciplinary Art. Pixel has done performances at the ROM, Artist Project, BMO Field, Waterloo Region Museum and internationally with Walking Tall in Kingston, Jamaica and Kaisokah Moko Jumbie in Trinidad.