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 women’s lives. Her forthcoming book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives (Lawrence & Wishart, 2024), traces her journey in piecing together a biography of Amy Ashwood Garvey from her fragmented and dispersed archive. Though often remembered primarily as Marcus Garvey’s first wife, Amy was a formidable Pan-African feminist and cultural producer in her own right. The book recovers Amy’s life and activism, spotlighting her crucial contributions to Black liberation and women’s rights. From co-founding the UNIA to creating radical social spaces in Harlem and London, Amy Ashwood Garvey’s legacy challenges us to reclaim and rethink the overlooked histories of Black women’s activism.
Beyond traditional archival research, Nydia's work explores the creative possibilities offered by what is missing or erased from historical records. She asks how we might imagine into these silences and create new spaces where Black women’s lives—often left unrecorded or marginalized—can be seen, heard, and felt. In Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, Nydia employs what she calls ‘curatorial fabulations,’ reimagining the gaps in Amy’s archive by weaving together autoethnographic reflections, the work of contemporary Black feminist researchers, archivists, curators, and artists, and her own visual art practice. This method allows her to envision Black feminist archives not as static sites of historical memory but as living, dynamic spaces shaped by care, creativity, and resistance to institutional limitations.
This approach is exemplifed in Nydia’s ongoing visual series Becoming with the Archive, which explores how her identity evolved as a result of her research with Black women’s archives. Reflecting on her experience as a Black woman of Jamaican parentage, the descendant of enslaved Africans born in the United States and now living in the UK, this work examines how personal and collective histories are shaped by and with the archives we work with and create. This exploration is central to Daughters of Diaspora, Nydia’s artist film created during her Caird Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum. Developed in collaboration with Black and women of color creatives, Daughters of Diaspora explores the enduring legacies of slavery on Black women’s emotional lives. Offering a critical Black feminist perspective on historical memory and curatorial practices, the film responds to a curated selection of archives and artifacts from the museum’s collection, asking how these historical materials can inform Black women’s understanding of their present realities and shape their hopes and dreams for the future.
This self-reflective exploration continues in Nydia’s work-in-progress artist film Amy and Me in the Archive, which delves into her research on Amy Ashwood Garvey. Blending archival investigation with personal narrative, the film not only examines Ashwood Garvey’s legacy as a Pan-African feminist but also reflects on the act of curating Black feminist archives. The film interrogates how historical materials shape Black women’s understanding of their own identities, while also revealing the emotional and intellectual complexities of engaging with fragmented and dispersed archives.
Nydia’s experience spans academia, archives, research libraries, museums, and contemporary art galleries. During her master’s degree in Women’s History at Sarah Lawrence College, she worked in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, supporting archivists, academics, and artists with their research. She earned a PhD in Gender Studies from SOAS University of London, where she was a Senior Teaching Fellow, taught courses on gender, migration, and diasporas, and was awarded the Director’s Teaching Prize for her liberationist, decolonial pedagogy. As a member of Feminist Review's editorial board, she co-edited the issue on queer, feminist, and decolonial archives (2020). She was also the Curator of Talks and Research at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, where she collaborated with research and university partners to co-curate programs that bridged academic discourse and public engagement. Key projects included echoes, feelings, and meanings (2021), Five Volumes for Toni Morrison (2020), and several programmes within the Politics of Pleasure Collective (2018–2019).
As a curator, writer, and artist, Nydia is committed to creating spaces for dialogue, healing, and transformation—where Black women’s stories are not only preserved but celebrated. She continues this work at Royal Museums Greenwich as a member of the Atlantic Worlds Gallery Advisory Board and through her forthcoming Whose Heritage 3.0 Curatorial Fellowship, where she will collaborate with Hannah Cushworth to enhance access to and engagement with the fine and decorative art collection at the Queen’s House.