André Pierre was born around 1916 in Port-au-Prince. He was a farmer and an active vodou practitioner before being introduced to the Centre d'Art in the late 1940's by film-maker Maya Deren, who had admired his temple wall paintings. Pierre eventually became a vodou priest internationally noted for his highly respected visualizations of the vodou pantheon of deities in his paintings. He continued to paint in his family compound/vodou community located in Croix-des-Missions on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. In 1996, Pierre was the gold Medal Winner at the 5th Venezuelan Biennale. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Davenport Museum in Iowa, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum in hartford, Connecticut, and Ramapo college in Mahwah, New Jersey. His work is published in Haiti: Art Naif, Art Vodou (1988), Where Art is Joy (Rodman, 1988), Island on Fire (Demme, 1997), and Dialogue du Réel et de l’Imaginaire (1990). Andre Pierre died on October 4th, 2005. (Bio info from Island on Fire. More information on André Pierre can be found on the Haitian Art Society memorial page).