The daughter of Haitian painter Micheline Prézeau (1943–), Barbara Prézeau Stephenson grew up in an artistic milieu. She was part of the first cohort of the l’École Nationale des Arts (ENARTS) in Port-au-Prince in 1983, and was mentored by several renowned Haitian artists including Rose-Marie Desruisseau (1933–1988). Between 1985 and 1989, B. Prézeau pursued further studies in Canada, where she obtained her Bachelor’s degree in visual arts while studying art theory and history at the University of Ottawa. It was in Canada that she exhibited her work for the first time: in 1988 at the Michel Tétreault Gallery in Montreal and in 1989 as part of Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter, a travelling event organised by the Diasporic African Women’s Art Collective (DAWA), of which she was a member. The exhibition was curated by artists Buseje Bailey (date?) and Grace Channer (1959–) and was the first in Canada to present the work of Black women artists. In 1989 B. Prézeau moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne’s École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1993 she moved to Senegal, beginning a collaboration with the sculpture workshop of Gérard Chenet (1927–2022) in Toubab Dialaw. Returning to Haiti in 1995, B. Prézeau was part of the reopening of the ENARTS, which had been gravely impacted by the violence following the military coup of 21 September 1991. Between 1995 and 2000, she held the position of consultant in charge of the French-speaking world in the Cultural Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Haiti.

B. Prézeau is a multidisciplinary artist: her work includes painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, installation and digital creation. Her approach is characterised by a constant quest to explore and appropriate the Atlantic world – a world significantly marked by the violence and aftermath of the European colonisation of the Americas, by the genocide of indigenous peoples and the mass deportation and enslavement of African men and women. The research is notably incarnated in her series of square-format paintings, 1492: Christophe Colomb (2021). Inspired by personal experience and cultural treasures encountered on her numerous inter- and transatlantic travels, B. Prézeau references Afro-Caribbean, Taíno and West African cultures as part of her work. Since the 2010s, she has widened her artistic perspective to include performance and installation.

B. Prézeau has shown her work in numerous museums in the United States, Canada, France and Haiti. In 2014 she participated in the exhibition Haïti, deux siècles de création artistique at the Grand Palais in Paris, with a video installation that recounted her performance Le Cercle de Freda (2013), which had taken place at the Halle Vital in Jacmel, Haiti, during the group exhibition Haïti: royaume de ce monde. For the performance, B. Prézeau invited a circle of women, including the actor Paula Clermont Péan and the artist Pascale Faublas (1961–), to embroider artificial flowers onto a pink veil. Between 2017 and 2019, her work toured the United States as part of the travelling exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago. In the exhibition Oser la liberté – Figures des combats contre l’esclavage at the Pantheon in France in 2023, her work L’Arrestation de la reine Anacaona (1991) centres the last Taíno woman chief of Yaguana, now the town of Léogâne in Haiti, who governed the Cacicazgo of Xaragua following the death of her brother, Bohéchio. Anacaona was renowned for her fierce resistance to Spanish colonisation and the slavery enforced on her people, for which she was arrested and hanged on the orders of Spanish governor Nicolás de Ovando. In this work, B. Prézeau pays homage to the Taíno warrior and resistance fighter, setting her in her rightful place in the pantheon of heroic figures of the struggle for freedom, while reminding us that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were the first victims of Spanish colonisation. In 2025, this work was celebrated as part of the exhibition Paris Noir at the Centre Pompidou.

B. Prézeau has represented Haiti at a number of international biennials, including Dakar (1992, 2010), Havana (2000, 2025), Caracas (2017) and Mercosur (2018). In 2015 the artist represented Haiti at the Latin American pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. In the same year, she was an invited artist and lecturer at Yale University in the USA, where she created a performance entitled The Fabrication of the Creole Women, once again highlighting the collective textile practices of women of African descent.