Elenora “Rukiya” Brown comes from a line of women homemakers and domestic workers. She went to dry-cleaning schooland trained on the sewing machine that her older sister had left at the family home in Chicago. She learned beading and sewing from her grandmother in Louisiana, where she was regularly sent during the holidays. E. Brown was also a member of a young girls’ club where they made dolls, their clothes and shoes by hand. In 1969, a traumatic event brought her back to her family’s homeland of New Orleans. She subsequently stopped doll making and left the United States for the United Kingdom, living there for nearly a decade.
Returning to New Orleans in 1995, E. Brown worked in the fashion industry. Facing discrimination, she resumed doll making as a way to relieve stress. She then first showed her work at the Congo Square African Marketplace of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans in the late 1990s. At that time, E. Brown’s dolls were made in soft material, and were faceless.

After surviving Hurricane Katrina in 2005, E. Brown was forced to move back to Chicago, where, distressed by human and material loss, she chose the arts over a drug-based psychiatric treatment. Her doll making technique changed: she started using clay, moulding faces for her creations. Winds of Change (2005) is the first collection of works in which E. Brown narrates different moments of what she perceives as another Great Migration that New Orleans has experienced since Hurricane Katrina. It was followed by the series Uprooted: Look up, Hold on (2006), and Unclaimed Memories (2007). Exhibiting her work at the Stella Jones Gallery in 2006, E. Brown met fellow exhibitor Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), who asked for a piece from her Winds of Change series in exchange for one of her own works.

In 2012, E. Brown, who had relocated back to Louisiana, found herself helping the Big Chief of a Mardi Gras Indian Tribe from her neighbourhood to bead flowers for his performance suit. This collaboration led her to join the masking tradition of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indians [also known as “Black Indians”].
She did so in honour of the women in her life – notably her late sister assassinated in the streets at 16-years-old – and of the heritage of her Chahta great grandmother. That same year, she created her first performance suit, Metamorphosis (2012). In 2013, E. Brown chose to become a part of the Creole Wide West Tribe, becoming their Queen. The artist uses hand-sewn 15/12 mm beads to create scenes on her suits relating notably to Black and Native American traditions and lexicons – including the depiction of sacred animals such as owls, crows, eagles, buffalos, and the use of add-on ribbons, brooches and marabou bird feathers. E. Brown’s mastery of fabric construction allows her to shape, manipulate and distinctively curve textile to produce 3D figures that burst out of the garment, implementing techniques she developed during different workshops she attended or gave in Nigeria, Cameroon and Haiti. Despite the male-dominated culture of the Masking Indians, her designs, forged by defiance and resilience, centre femininity and female figures – Metamorphosis (2012), The White Buffalo Calf Woman (2017) and Black Madonna (2018).

Her suits When Black People Could Fly (2014), I am the First Gold the First Diamond, I am the Living Earth (2015) and The White Buffalo Calf Woman (2017), are respectively part of the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ohio State University Libraries, and the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac.