The Future of Black Feminist Archives: Performance Reading by Nydia A. Swaby and Conversation with Zakiya Collier

Join us for a performance reading by artist-researcher, writer, and curator Nydia A. Swaby, drawn from her book Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives (Lawrence Wishart, 2024).

Through archival images, autoethnography, and visual storytelling, Swaby traces her research into the legacy of Pan-African feminist Amy Ashwood Garvey, reflecting on what it means to curate a Black feminist archive from the fragments, silences, and scattered geographies that shaped her life.

Following the reading, Swaby will be joined by archivist and memory worker Zakiya Collier for a conversation on Black feminist archival practice and the possibilities it opens for reimagining both historical memory and contemporary cultural work. Together, they will reflect on how they tend to the traces of Black women’s lives and consider what it means to build and sustain archives rooted in care, kinship, and collective memory.

Nydia A. Swaby is a Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic, and affective dimensions of Black being and becoming. Nydia is a member of the editorial board for Feminist Review and co-edited its Archives issue. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London and has previously worked at the ICA, London and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Nydia was the inaugural Caird Research Fellow jointly based at Royal Museums Greenwich and The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She is currently a Whose Heritage Curatorial Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich and contributes to the advisory board for the Atlantic Worlds Gallery at the National Maritime Museum in London. Nydia’s film daughter(s) of diaspora was installed as part of the exhibition Archive of One’s Own at the Singapore International Photography Festival. Her book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published in October 2024 as part of Lawrence Wishart's Radical Black Women series.

Zakiya Collier is an Afro-Carolinian archivist, memory worker, and educator. Her work and research explore archival practices that account for the material conditions of Black life and the role of cooperative thought in the sustainability of cultural memory. She leads The Black Memory Workers, a community of 250+ Black-diasporic memory workers committed to practicing care and intention as they prioritize the documentation, long-term preservation, and celebration of Black life and experiences. Their recent experience includes being the Program Director for Archiving the Black Web, co-producing the forthcoming documentary film Somebody’s Gone, serving as the first Digital Archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and co-editing a special double issue of The Black Scholar on Black Archival Practice.