Lydia Y. Nichols

Lydia Y. Nichols is a writer, curator, and ethnographer native to New Orleans. Her work considers the lived experience, ancestral memory, and historical imaginary of race and their impacts on Black aesthetics in the outdoors. She has been published in 64 Parishes Magazine, Antenna's Signals Magazine, TheGrio.com, The Lens, Pelican Bomb, and Tribes Magazine. In 2014, Nichols co-produced the acclaimed public art exhibition ExhibitBE, which featured the work of 40 street artists, sculptors, and installation artists in a five-building unoccupied apartment complex in New Orleans' Algiers neighborhood. She led research for the award-winning documentary film Mossville: When Great Trees Fall (2019), about a Black Louisiana community's erasure by industrial expansion and government negligence. Nichols is a contributing curator to Independent Curators International's traveling exhibition Notes for Tomorrow, which opened at Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery in February 2021. She is a 2020-21 Rising: Climate in Crisis resident at Tulane University's A Studio in the Woods. The resulting serial radio drama Don't Look Away will premier in Summer 2021, produced by No Dream Deferred Theatre Company. Nichols lives in New Orleans' Gentilly neighborhood with her toddler son, Amistad.