Heather Nickels is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, as well as an independent curator, arts writer and consultant. Most recently, she served as a Consulting Project Associate for the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2024). Previously, she was the Joyce Blackmon Curatorial Fellow of African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, where she curated the exhibition Persevere and Resist: The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett (2023). Nickels has worked for several American non- and for-profit arts institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Courtauld Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Sperone Westwater Gallery and Andrea Rosen Gallery. For two years, she worked as a project research associate for independent art historian Dr. Denise Murrell on the exhibition, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today | Le Modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse, at the Wallach Gallery, Columbia University (2018) and the Orsay Museum in Paris (2019).
Nickels completed a M.A. with Distinction in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Her dissertation focused on the short-lived “Little Paris Group” art collective and workshop active in Washington D.C. in the 1940s and 1950s. She graduated cum laude with a B.A in Art History from Barnard College in 2016. Her writing can be seen in and for various publications and organizations, such as Schoelkopf Gallery, monique meloche Gallery, the Horseman Foundation, BarnardTeaches, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (MBMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
