Dr. Monique Y. Wells Speaker at PCA Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony
We are very pleased to announce that this year’s Commencement Speaker for the Undergraduate Graduation Ceremony, on May 10, 2024, will be Dr. Monique Y. Wells. As a visionary, a change-maker, and a steward of legacy, Dr. Wells is an ideal speaker for our undergraduate students, who we hope will continue to embrace inclusiveness and foster a spirit of cooperation in all their future endeavors.
A native of Houston, Texas, Dr. Wells is a 32-year resident of Paris, France. Through her entrepreneurial work as a veterinary pathologist and toxicologist, travel professional, writer, speaker, and mentor, she embraces and harnesses the power of education to change lives.
Dr. Wells worked for 13 years in the corporate world before combining her passion for life sciences, the arts, literacy, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) education, travel/study abroad, and women’s empowerment under the umbrella of her U.S. non-profit organization, the Wells International Foundation (WIF).
Having become enamored of the arts, Dr. Wells started learning about the professional art world when she began investigating the poignant story of Beauford Delaney, a brilliant figurative and abstract expressionist painter who moved to Paris in 1953. Delaney was a Southern-born, gay, African-American man who suffered from mental illness and spent the last four years of his life in a psychiatric institution in the French capital.
Since WIF’s inception in 2015, Dr. Wells has organized several arts-based projects and programs, including live and virtual exhibitions of Delaney’s work and a virtual exhibition called COVID-19 PAGES: The Influence & Inspiration of Women, which featured the work of professional and amateur female artists from across the globe. She is currently working on a project that will present the importance of Delaney’s fragile mental health to his artistic practice to encourage frank discussion of mental illness in the African-American community in his hometown of Knoxville, TN.
You can connect with Dr. Wells at:
- E-mail: [email protected]
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