Nyssa Chow

Nyssa Chow is an oral historian, artist, and writer from Trinidad whose work is grounded in the memory practices of the Caribbean and the Global South. Her practice attends to the poetry of ordinary lives: the ways of being and knowing held by those who live at the margins of agency. Through installation, social practice, and documentary art, she builds otherwise architectures for remembering: histories at the scale of intimate disclosure, place-based, communal, embodied, relational. She served as Interim Director and Core Faculty of the Oral History Master’s Program at Columbia University, was the 2019–2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts, and a Visiting Scholar at Princeton's Humanities Council. She co-founded the DocX Fellowship at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, a funded program supporting documentary artists across the Global South and diaspora. She co-directed the NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project at Columbia University and has conducted oral histories for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. She works across film and the arts and is Lead Collaborator for Oral History & Participatory Design on Jennifer Wen Ma's Wings of Everchange, a permanent public monument commissioned by the City of New York. Her civic artwork Trace: A Memorial was recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives and the New York State Senate, and The Story of Her Skin was awarded the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History.