NIKKI A. GREENE, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Art History at Wellesley College. She has traveled internationally to deliver lectures on the Arts of the African diaspora, including to Chile, England, Ethiopia, Italy, and South Africa. Her forthcoming book, Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and The Sonic in Contemporary Black Art (Duke University Press, 2024) presents a new interpretation of the work of Renée Stout, and Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and considers the intersection between the body, black identity, and the sonic possibilities of the visual using key examples of painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation. Grime, Glitter and Glass was awarded a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. She is currently organizing an exhibition on contemporary performance art by Black femme artists.

In January 2021, Greene served as a co-producer of When We Gather, a three-minute film based on an extraordinary vision by María Magdalena Campos-Pons who was moved by the election of Kamala Harris as Vice-President-elect of the United States and directed by the talented filmmaker Codie Elaine Oliver. Greene also wrote and hosted the accompanying online special broadcast, When We Gather: Together, a behind-the-scenes look at the film, meant to move people to join in a global celebration of women. Screenings of the film and program continue to take place in museums, nonprofits, and universities around the country.

She most recently held the Visiting Scholar position at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University(2021-22), as one of the inaugural New England Humanities Consortium’s Faculty of Color Working Group Mellon Fellows. She also served as an advisor to the ICA Boston for the 59th Venice Biennale presenting the work of Simone Leigh for the United States Pavilion in 2022. Other honors include the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art and Africana Studies at Wellesley College, the Woodrow Wilson Career Advancement Fellowship, an artist residency at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, the Richard D. Cohen Fellowship and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute’s (ALARI) Traveling Faculty Seminar to study Afr0-Latin American Art History in the Americas (2020-2024), both at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She is the former Visual Arts Editor of Transition magazine published by the Hutchins Center.

Greene’s essays have appeared in American Studies Journal, Aperture, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, The Delaware Review of Latin American Studies, and WBUR Boston. She has also written for The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, among others.

Nikki A. Greene received her BA with honors from Wesleyan University, and her Masters and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Delaware. She proudly hails from Newark, New Jersey, and serves on the Board of Trustees of her alma mater, The Taft School.  She lives with her husband and two children in Massachusetts.