Princess Alexander `26 grew up on the south side of Chicago, the middle child between an older brother and a younger sister. Homeschooled through much of elementary school, she later attended a boarding school on a scholarship in Massachusetts, where she ran cross country, rowed and played squash. The small class sizes and exposure to students from across the world began to shape her academic curiosity.
“First year me and now me are very different people,” she said.The boarding school was a predominantly white institution, and Alexander said finding community there required real effort. She joined the Black Student Union (BSU) and leaned on her sports teams for connection.
The experience, she said, ultimately prepared her for Grinnell in ways she did not expect. “Going there really helped me navigate Grinnell and made coming here less of a culture shock.” Alexander came to Grinnell as a Laurel Scholar, a merit and need-based scholarship program for students from Chicago, which she said was a significant factor in her decision to enroll. “It’s almost why I came here,” she said. The program provided her with funding, mentorship and an immediate cohort of peers. Through it, she was able to travel to Denmark to conduct independent archival research at the Black Diamond Library, accessing rare documents and recordings related to Bahraini pearl divers as part of her work in an art history course.
Her first year was exploratory across the board. She took biology, French and an anthropology class, unsure of where her interests would land. A professor told the class he did not give out A’s because he wanted students to demonstrate growth over time. Alexander was not convinced. “So maybe I would be a bio major, but that class kind of steered me away from it,” she said.
What pulled her toward art history was not the introductory survey but a single elective. After emailing Professor Fredo Rivera to ask whether she could join his Haitian Art and Visual Culture course without the prerequisite, she was let in, and the experience changed the direction of her time at Grinnell. “I’ve always loved history, and connecting that to something tangible, visual, and creative was really intellectually stimulating,” she said.
The course took students to the Waterloo Center for the Arts, home to the largest publicly held collection of Haitian art in the diaspora. “After that class, I was like, I can’t imagine not declaring,” Alexander said. “It just felt like it clicked into place.” Through that course, Alexander began working with Petrouchka Moïse, assistant professor and director of the Haitian Arts Digital Crossroads (HADC) project, a joint initiative between Grinnell College Libraries and the Waterloo Center for the Arts. The project aims to make the Haitian art collection digitally accessible to academic communities worldwide.
Alexander has spent the past three years archiving works, connecting them to metadata, supporting digital exhibitions and conducting visual analysis. She also served as a student curator for the Rhizomatic Intimacies exhibition at the Grinnell College Museum of Art as part of the art history exhibition seminar with Professor Michael Mackenzie, an experience she said deepened her interest in curatorial work and how information is presented within museum and cultural spaces.
It was the limitations of that archival work that pushed her toward her second major. While cataloging Haitian art, Alexander kept running into problems the existing systems could not solve. Fields for Creole translations, Vodou ceremonial flags and Veves simply did not exist. “This is something that technology is behind on,” she said.
She decided to add a computer science (CS) major, not because it came easily, but because she wanted to be able to make practical changes alongside her theoretical work. Her first CS course, with Professor Samuel Rebelsky, was among the hardest she took at Grinnell. She went to every office hour and every mentor session, learned to ask for the accommodations she needed, and eventually found that the collaborative nature of CS courses brought her out of her shell in ways other coursework had not. “Even though it was really hard, it really strengthened my self-advocacy skills,” she said.
Those two majors came together in her Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), a merit-based fellowship that funds undergraduate research as a pipeline toward PhD programs. Alexander’s project examines how contemporary exhibitions of Black women artists function as sites where the colonial logic of the museum is both reproduced and challenged, drawing on decolonial and feminist frameworks to analyze how artists use participatory design and narrative storytelling to reassert control over their own representation in institutional spaces. She presented the work most recently at Carleton College.
Alexander also sang with the Grinnell Singers for two years and with the Young, Gifted and Black Gospel (YGB) Choir for three, served as a Community Adviser and was a first and second year representative for the BSU.
After graduation, Alexander will pursue a Master of Science in Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, where she plans to develop her interests in UX design, library science and archival work. She said she considered Northwestern’s program for its flexibility but chose Michigan for its structure, its community, and the fact that she has family nearby.
A PhD and possibly law school remain longer-term considerations. “I feel like you can make a lot of changes legislatively,” she said. For now, she is looking forward to having time to make art again. “I don’t have a lot of regrets in life,”Alexander said, “because I feel like they’re all lessons.”
