The Strength Within Me, NoelMüse️ Team Up To #BreakTheBias

All portraits in the series are shot by K'la Lawson (NoelMüse) and curated by Azaria Samuels. Samuels said that she will be working on a digital component as well. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Dr. Daphne Evans looks out of the frame, her eyes focused squarely in front of her. Her wrists cross evenly, hands flattened against the air. Her fingers become wings. If a viewer leans in, they can imagine her between breaths, still just beyond the camera's lens. It seems as though she is ready to take on the world, one patient at a time.

Evans is one of a dozen women pictured in Celebrating Women’s History Month 2022, an installation from Strength Within Me founder Azaria Samuels and photographer K’la Lawson, who publishes under the moniker NoelMüse. After a five-day run at Creative Arts Workshop (CAW) earlier this month, Samuels plans to have an online continuation of the series, she said last week. Several of the women pictured cross their arms as a way to #BreakTheBias, this year’s theme for the annual International Women’s Day campaign.

In the interest of full disclosure, this reporter participated (with some ethical hesitancy) in the show. I wanted other women, and other disabled folks, to see that journalism based in joy and justice is possible and that their voices have a place in it.

“The thought here was honestly to amplify what’s going on in our backyards,” Samuels said in a recent interview at CAW, where she is a visitor services and operations associate. “A lot of times, so many youth just look up to what they see on T.V., and don’t even know that in their backyards are real trailblazers. A lot of them [these women] are making history in their roles.” 

Her work around the show began earlier this year, when she started thinking about how to celebrate International Women’s Day in New Haven. In previous years, her group Strength Within Me convened brunches at Long Wharf Theatre, where she worked before joining the Shubert Theatre and Creative Arts Workshop last year  When she approached CAW Director Anne Coates with the idea, Coates found a March lull between exhibitions. While it was only a few days, Samuels said, it was a start.

Lawson and Samuels, who have collaborated on creative projects for three years. 

Samuels also pulled in Lawson, who has been a frequent collaborator since the two first met as marketing associates at D.A.R.E. America over three years ago. Born and raised in New Haven, the 29-year-old artist is a photographer, painter, videographer, and dancer. During her years as a student at Wilbur Cross High School, she carried a disposable camera with her everywhere she went. Her freshman year at Southern Connecticut State University, she started a photo blog. NoelMüse grew out of that creative work.

She sees herself “breaking the bias” every day as a multimedia artist who can’t be held down, she said in an interview last week. It’s a trait for which she credits her mom’s support and willingness to let her experiment as a kid. In addition to her photography, she sells merchandise, still dances, and is starting to teach art classes across New Haven. 

As they put together the show, she and Samuels built a list of women that included medical doctors, fire personnel, fashion designers, social workers, and artists who are cobbling together multiple jobs to make their creative lives work. Many of them are women Samuels knows through Karaine (Kay) Smith Holness, owner of Hair’s Kay Beauty Salon and a founding member of the Jamaican American Connection, Inc. (JAC). In particular, Samuels praised Holness for connecting her with several women of color physicians, many of whom are also her clients.

Dr. Camelia Lawrence and Dr. Sherene Mason.

They include figures like Evans, an internal medicine practitioner at Yale New Haven Health who moved to New Haven in 2002 for her residency and never left. Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina—“the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement,” she said proudly in a phone call Friday evening—Evans didn’t know that she wanted to practice medicine until she got to college, and found that the field married her love for science and physiology and her deep interest in helping people.

“I had to meditate a lot about it,” she said. After medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she moved to New Haven two decades ago. As a Black woman in medicine and a mother, she said, she breaks the bias every day by walking out the door and into the workplace. She praised Holness, who has helped introduce her to several fellow Black women in medicine and is also her hairdresser. 

“There are so many [biases],” she said, adding that she sees it as part of her mission to help other women move ahead in their work, whether they are in medicine or a different field entirely “There is still so much work to be done.”

In another of NoelMüse’s portraits, Chantelle Martin and Taylor Morrison sit quietly in a field, stalks of grass rising behind them. Both are relaxed but on guard, their cream-colored dresses ruffled past their shoulders. Martin looks not at the viewer, but away from the camera, out to the universe that exists beyond the frame. To the right, Morrison places one open hand over Martin’s kneecap, soft and protective against the smooth skin. She looks toward the camera but not directly at it, denying the viewer any sort of gratification.

They are not here, they seem to say, for anyone’s viewership or enjoyment but their own. Samuels said that she and Lawson were excited to collaborate with them because they #BreakTheBias in their everyday work: Martin is a social worker and Morrison is a dancer. In another image, fashion designer Chineye Anako stands tall in profile, a gold dress flowing around her body and to the fertile ground below.      

The images, some of which Lawson shot in nature, weave a story of New Haven sheroes doing their everyday work quietly, methodically and with great care, and blazing a trail in the process. Each is a universe of its own making, celebrating not only each subject, but also the ways each subject has made the path a little easier for the women who may come after her.

That’s true for Dr. Sherene Mason, a pediatric nephrologist at ​​Connecticut Children's Medical Center. Originally, Mason said, she hesitated when Samuels reached out about the exhibition—she’s a self-described introvert and not used to calling attention to her accomplishments. Then she thought about what it might mean for other women and girls, particularly young women of color, who saw the portrait and realized that they could do the same thing.

​​”As I grow and I've gotten more senior, I think I've realized that it's more than me and myself,” she said. “There are young Brown and Black women who watch me.”

In Lawson’s finished photograph, she is outdoors in her crisp white coat, arms criss-crossed in front of her. Her palms plane out and form a wide X at the elbows. Instead of looking right into the camera, she’s looking beyond it, eyes fixed on the horizon line. Sunlight falls over her face, extending to the exposed brick behind her. There’s a suggestion of a smile that radiates to her eyes.

In a phone interview Monday afternoon, Mason said she doesn’t think actively of the ways she is breaking the bias, because “it’s an extremely heavy weight to carry.” Instead, she does it simply by walking into the workplace. As a Black woman and an immigrant, she has found that she has to dress more professionally than her peers to command the same level of attention each time she walks into a room. During the height of the pandemic, when it wasn’t uncommon to wear scrubs, she found that patients would regularly assume she was not a doctor unless she wore a white coat over those scrubs.

“That brings out an extra layer [of bias] that most of us as minority women and Black women face,” she said. Years ago, she recalled hearing the same note around dressing professionally from Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale professor of internal medicine, epidemiology, and public health at the Yale School of Medicine and award-winning, ceiling-shattering epidemiologist who now chairs President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 Equity Task Force.

It stayed with Mason during Grand Rounds, just as it has during her years practicing medicine in the state. In Connecticut, she said, it still isn’t uncommon to be the only or one of the only Black physicians in institutional, still-very-white spaces. When she isn’t practicing at the hospital, she is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. 

“You just do it [break the bias] because of who you are,” she said. “It’s knowing and standing firm on the shoulders of your predecessors, your ancestors.”

At Creative Arts Workshop, Samuels installed Mason's portrait beside an image of Dr. Camelia Lawrence, director of breast surgery at the Hospital of Central Connecticut and MidState Medical Center. The placement fit: the two, both members of the Jamaican American Connection, are close in real life. 

Ophthalmologist Dr. Ninani Kombo (pictured at left), a practicing physician and assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Yale School of Medicine, echoed Mason in calling the exhibition “such an honor” in which she was excited to participate. After coming to New Haven two decades ago, she and her husband made the choice to raise their family in the city’s Beaver Hills neighborhood. She already had one child when she entered medical school, and had two more while finishing her degree.

In the city, her work is dedicated to “taking care of my New Haven crew,” she said. She does volunteer work at the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center and Yale’s Dana Eye Clinic, which serves patients who are uninsured and may not have documentation. She also teaches in Yale’s “Pathways To Science” program. She said that her service and mentorship is part of how she breaks the bias.

“You know, once you're in that space, you do it whether or not you like it,” she said. “I have patients that are so thrilled that I'm a Brown person. The type of care that I provide is very caring, very thorough, I think that's one way.”

For Samuels, the exhibition is a beginning to a larger body of work she hopes to create and curate in New Haven. She said that she does not see the project as ending in March, but becoming part of the Strength Within Me brand as she builds it out. Last Saturday, she was particularly excited to see young people in the gallery, where a mirror, ring light and selfie station invited young viewers to picture themselves as part of the show. 

“Honestly, my goal is for youth to be able to walk by and see themselves, and say ‘Hey, I  can be on this wall,’” she said. “You should be able to see yourself on this wall.”