Nicole Fleetwood

Nicole Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School and in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at the College of Arts and Science. She holds a Ph.D. (2001) and M.A. (1998) in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, and a B.Phil. in Interdisciplinary Studies (magna cum laude, 1994) from Miami University. Her academic career includes serving as James Weldon Johnson Professor at NYU (2021-2024), Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University (2019-2021), Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers (2011-2019), Assistant Professor at Rutgers (2005-2011) and at the University of California, Davis (2003-2005). She has also directed the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers (2013-2016) and held various affiliate faculty roles.

Fleetwood’s research specializations encompass Black art and cultural history, aesthetics, photography and documentary studies, and art and activism, with a particular emphasis on art produced in the era of mass incarceration. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020), which garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize from the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism from the College Art Association. Her other key publications include On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011), the latter awarded the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize by the American Studies Association. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Fleetwood curated the acclaimed traveling exhibition Marking Time, which premiered at MoMA PS1 and was hailed by The New York Times as one of 2020’s most important art moments. She has received significant support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, including a $1 million grant for her prison art initiative, as well as fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Cullman Center, and the Whiting Foundation. Her scholarly articles appear in outlets such as Artforum, Aperture, The New York Times, and Social Text, and she has co-edited special issues of Aperture and Feminist Formations. Fleetwood is completing a new book, Between the River and Railroad Tracks, to be published by Little, Brown.

Professional Email: nicole.fleetwood@nyu.edu