Here at the Stuart Hall Archive Project we have embarked upon a collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. This summer we have been thrilled to welcome three PhD Visiting Fellows, who have been conducting research at the archive.
Nzinga Simmons is a curator and art history scholar based in Durham, North Carolina. She is currently completing a PhD in Art History at Duke University. Simmons’ research examines black contemporary artists working in New Media; that is, making use of the internet, non-fungible tokens, artificial intelligence, and other forms of digital technologies in their practice. Her work considers how these artists refuse the assumed neutrality of technological systems and conceptualize the digital realm as a context uniquely primed for the assertion of black futurity. As a SHAP fellow, Simmons examined Stuart Hall’s contributions to the British Black Arts Movement, a radical art movement founded by a generation of young, artists of color, whose work grappled with sociopolitical issues plaguing Great Britain. Simmons highlights the impact of Stuart Hall’s media theories to the formation of the Black Audio Film Collective, an artist group interested in employing cinema to conceptualize Black identity within a British context. Amid an influx contemporary discourse examining technology’s pernicious influence, Simmons’ research opens new ways of conceptualizing technology as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their agency and subjectivity in the digital realm and beyond. Prior to graduate studies, Simmons was awarded the Tina Dunkley Curatorial Fellowship in American Art and served in the curatorial departments at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia.