Nydia A. Swaby is a black feminist researcher, writer, and curator. Her practice engages archives, auto/ethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to curate programmes and visual narratives, write research and performance texts that explore the gendered, diasporic, and affective dimensions of black being and becoming. Nydia is an editor of Feminist Review and co-edited an issue on Archives (July 2020).
She is a curator at the ICA, where she leads in the delivery of the talks and research programme. Nydia was the inaugural Caird Research Fellow at UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery and Royal Museums Greenwich, where she developed creative and curatorial projects based on her research in the museum’s collection.
She is currently writing a speculative biography about pan-African feminist Amy Ashwood Garvey that uses her archive, life, and activism to ask broader questions about the futurity of Black feminist archives and archival research (Lawrence Wishart 2024).