Janice Lawrence-Clarke-
Janice Lawrence-Clarke is the President and Creative Director of JLC PRoductions, and Founder of CAFE – Caribbean American Fashion ExchangeTM, a program aimed at joining fashion design talent and U.S. markets, and through which she has established the CAFETM Scholarship Fund at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). The CAFETM Scholarship is to be distributed to two students who live in the Caribbean to study at FIT.
Lawrence-Clarke has worked in the fashion industry since 1975 first as a runway and illustration model then entering the business side of the industry as Fashion Director of sportswear manufacturer, Evan Picone. In 1984, she launched Visual Excitement!, a fashion and trade show company which produced events for the likes of Breckenridge Sportswear, Jones New York, New York City Opera Guild, and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
After her first engagement in the business of fashion, Lawrence-Clarke would grow to champion the development of a Caribbean fashion industry, and relocated to Trinidad & Tobago in 1994. While there, she rose to prominence in the country’s social and fashion scene as a journalist and a fashion expert revolutionizing coverage of fashion events in print media by developing the ‘Style Page’ for the Trinidad Guardian; writing a social column for The Independent; and, working as Associate Editor of Ibis Magazine.
Returning to the United States in 1999, Lawrence-Clarke formed her second, and current, consulting venture, JLC PRoductions, a fashion and culture marketing, promotion, and special events company. Here she combines her social entrepreneurship and fashion-industry expertise to market and promote cultural events, and continue championing the development of the Caribbean fashion industry. To this end, as the project’s international industry resource, she consulted with a division of Trinidad & Tobago’s Ministry of Trade, Industry, Investment and Communications, for the development of a strategic plan for that country’s fashion industry. In addition, she purposes to bring attention to Caribbeans in fashion through several events such as A Taste of Caribbean Carnival (March 2017) and highlighted by #TheCaribbeanatFIT.
Demonstrating her personal belief in economic empowerment through cultural development, in 2014 Lawrence-Clarke partnered in the masquerade carnival theatre company, DRJ Vision In Motion, to present the story of Mandela during the 2014 West Indian American Day Carnival Association’s Labor Day Parade, on Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. She has produced numerous fashion and cultural presentations over the years, both in the U.S. and the Caribbean.
A fervent believer in education, Lawrence-Clarke completed the first of her degrees in Fashion Buying & Merchandising at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology while a runway/illustration model (1981). She then earned her Bachelor’s degree in Communications Technology as a Dean’s List, University Scholar, at New York University (2002), and her Masters of Business Administration from American Intercontinental University (AIU), with a dual concentration in Project Management and Entertainment Management, while in Atlanta, Georgia (2010). While at AIU, she was inducted into the international honor society, Sigma Beta Delta.
