Living and working in Harlem, Elizabeth Colomba was born in 1976 in the Paris region, to a family from the island of Martinique in the French West Indies. An assiduous reader of European comics, she turned to painting at a very young age. She studied at the Estienne school and at the Beaux-arts in Paris. Through a classic approach to figuration, she offers black personalities a spotlight and a dignity that they have too often been denied. Her paintings have been exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, at the Museum of Art of Princeton University and at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. In 1998, she moved to Los Angeles and worked as a story boarder in the motion picture industry. This is where, she met writer Aurélie Lévy with whom she collaborated on the screenplay of her first graphic novel, Queenie, the Godmother of Harlem (2021). It is probably no coincidence that this work retraces the true journey of Stephanie St. Clair, born in the 19th century in Martinique who became a feared gang leader in Harlem during the prohibition.
