Niama Safia Sandy
Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based cultural anthropologist, multidisciplinary artist, independent curator and exhibition-maker, organizer, and educator. Her artistic, curatorial, and pedagogical practices all hinge upon justice, activism, creating visibility, and dialogue by elucidating connections where most had not thought to make them. The lifeblood of Sandy’s work is about making art, history and ideas accessible, and collaborating with and caring for artists across many disciplines to offer audiences contemporary interventions that challenge, reconcile or reframe those histories toward something new and more equitable for all. She is deeply invested in multidisciplinary experiences because she believes the artificial barriers created between artistic fields often puts practitioners at a disadvantage. Breaking these disciplinary and hierarchical boundaries allows us to connect with the animating spirit that spurs our work forward, and to expand our thinking about the manner in which things are connected.
Sandy is currently the Inaugural Curatorial Fellow 2024-2025 with Antenna, New Orleans. In 2024, she was awarded ArtTable’s annual Curatorial Leadership Award. She has practiced pedagogical methods with undergraduate and graduate fine arts students at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. At Pratt, Niama is a recipient of the 2023 Faculty Development Fund, and the 2022-23 and 2023-24 School of Art Dean’s Innovation Fund grants. She has also served as the Manager of Grants and Education Programs for the Black Artists + Designers Guild (BADG). Sandy also served as Consulting Producer for New York Winter Jazz Fest 2021, the Inaugural Curator-and-Writer-in-Residence at Fridman Gallery (2021), and Performance Curator at TEDWomen 2021. She has served on panels and in advisory capacities for Artadia, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Bemis Center, Chamber Music America, En Foco, and many other national arts organizations.
Niama has mounted exhibitions across the United States and internationally, including Black Magic: AfroPasts/AfroFutures (2016 and 2017), Refraction: New Photography of Africa and its Diaspora (2018), In Plain Sight/Site (2018). Niama has presented, co-convened, and participated in programs at Creative Time, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, MICA, the World Around Summit, Harvard University, National Sawdust, Oberlin College, The Public Theater, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, 1014, and more. Sandy has utilized her exhibition and programmatic work as a healing and generative space, a portal for transmutation to activating inquiry and reflection into our relationships with beauty, history, creativity, power, and life itself. No matter the disciplinary intersections her work crosses, she sifts through the remnants of history in the hope of lifting us all to a higher state of historical, ontological and spiritual wholeness in the process. In recent years this has extended to the creation of new initiatives and programs.
Among Niama’s collaborative initiatives is The Blacksmiths, a national coalition of artists, presenters and producers across disciplines specifically dedicated to transforming the way Black art professionals are stewarded into the space founded in 2020. In 2022, Sandy co-founded THIS IS A MOVEMENT, an initiative seeking to create a more equitable, non-hierarchical, collaborative and imaginative music industry through an intersectional Black feminist lens.
She has completed commissioned writing on artists including Milford Graves, Dindga McCannon, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Nate Lewis, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Rachel Stern, Brittany Leeanne Williams and many others. Sandy and her work have been featured in The New York Times, Monopol, Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Camera Austria, OkayAfrica, CultureType, and other publications. Her writing has been featured in Artsy, Active Cultures LA, NATAAL, and more.