Nydia A. Swaby is a Black feminist researcher, writer, and curator based in London. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies [SOAS], an MA in Women’s History [Sarah Lawrence College], and a BA in Anthropology and African American Studies [Rollins College]. Her practice builds on theories of racial, gendered, diasporic, and queer formation, Black feminism, Black studies, and my previous experience working at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

In Nydia's creative approach to knowledge production, she uses archives, ethnography, photography, film, and the imagination to curate programs and visual narratives, write essays and performance pieces exploring the gendered and diasporic dimensions of Black being and becoming. She also creates ancestral altars using family pictures and memorabilia, found photographs and archival images, West African textiles and wood carvings, crystals, fossils, stones, shells, and other curios. These practices converge in her forthcoming monograph, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Back Feminist Archives (Lawrence Wishart, Summer 2022) and Caird Research Fellowship at The National Maritime Museum, ‘Curating Archives of Affect: Black Feminist Pasts, Presents, and Futures’ (December 2021 - September 2020), and my ongoing visual series, ‘Becoming with Archive: Blackness, Gender, Diaspora’ (2010 - Present).

Alongside this practice-based research, I work as the Curator of Learning at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where I collaborate with academics, curators, artists, and writers to develop a multi-disciplinary, practice-based research and learning program. I’m also a member of Feminist Review’s Editorial Collective and the Curator of Programmes, and co-edited a recent issue on queer, feminist, diasporic, and decolonial archives. This portfolio highlights my independent research, visual, and curatorial work.