Nicole Awai

Brooklyn, New York

About Nicole Awai

Nicole Awai is a multimedia artist who earned her Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of South Florida in 1996. Awai was a featured artist in the 2005 Initial Public Offerings at the Whitney Museum. Awai was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2011 and an Art Matters Grant in 2012. Her work has been included in major exhibitions such as Greater New York at P.S.1/MOMA (2000), the Biennale of Ceramic in Contemporary Art (2003), Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), the 2008 Busan Biennale in Korea, Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago at the Museum of Latin American Art and Circles and Circuits I: Art and History of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora at the California African American Museum. Awai’s work is currently included in the Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, a Getty Initiative (2017-2018). Awai was a Critic at the Yale School of Art from 2009 to 2015 and is currently faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2018

Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2011

Website / Social Links

There are inescapable narratives embedded in all materiality… This is the oozing materiality in my work, the inextricable union of narrative and matter.”