Nydia Boyd has been a Faculty Member Since 2019 and is an Assistant Professor for Photography in Art and Visual Culture. Boyd was born in 1981 in Ithaca, New York. She currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College.
She holds a B.S. from Ithaca College and received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She has taught courses for the High Museum of Art, Anderson Ranch, and the Image Text MFA program at Cornell University. Blas has completed artist residencies at Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her work has been commissioned by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Airbnb, Harper’s Bazaar, and more.
Boyd uses photography, collage, video, and books to address matters of sexuality, intimacy, and her lived experience as an American girl, woman, and mother of Panamanian descent. She delicately weaves stories concerning circumstance, value, and power and uses her work to create a physical and allegorical space presented through a Black feminine lens. The result is an environment that is dependent upon the belief that in order to maintain resiliency, a magical outlook is necessary. In this space, props function as extensions of the body, costumes as markers of identity, and gestures/actions reveal the performance, celebration, discovery, and confrontation involved in reclaiming one's body for their own exploration, discovery, and understanding.