Nicole R. Fleetwood

Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic interested in Black art and cultural history, aesthetics, photography and documentary studies, and art and activism. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also the curator of the traveling exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which debuted at MoMA PS1. The exhibition was listed as “one of the most important art moments in 2020” by The New York Times and among the best shows of the year by The New Yorker and Hyperallergic.

Her other books include On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015), and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). Her writing appears in African American Review, American Quarterly, Aperture, Artforum, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Granta, Hyperallergic, LitHub, The New York Times, Public Books, Public Culture, Signs, Social Text, art catalogues, and edited anthologies.

Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and public programs at MoMA PS1, Art and Practice (LA), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Center for Photography at Woodstock, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Brown Arts Institute, Aperture Foundation, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and Zimmerli Museum of Art. She is the inaugural Genevieve Young Writing Fellow of the Gordon Parks Foundation. Her work has been supported by Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Council of Learned Societies, the Art for Justice Fund, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, Whiting Foundation, NJ Council for the Humanities, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, Ford Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Denniston Hill Residency.