Photo by Lawrence Agyei

Dr. Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator, and curator. She holds a Ph.D. and Master of Arts in Black Studies from Northwestern University, a Master of Arts in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design, and a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri. Her research focuses on Black aesthetic practices including fashion, performance, and contemporary art. Dr. Byrd has lectured at Washington University in St. Louis and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she developed new courses on fashion and race. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, Cultured, Teen Vogue, and Frieze, and across exhibition catalogs, academic journals, and books.

Dr. Byrd began her career in the arts with communications internships at the Regional Arts Commission in St. Louis and Creative Time in New York. In 2010, she launched SCULPT Magazine, a digital publication highlighting and providing opportunities to emerging artists around the United States. From 2021-2023, she worked as a curatorial research assistant on The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, a traveling exhibition co-organized by Baltimore Museum of Art and Saint Louis Art Museum. In addition to conducting research, she led the curation of the fashion and beauty presentations in the exhibition, including a tracksuit installation with works by Telfar, Wales Bonner, and Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. Dr. Byrd’s previous projects include All of Living is Risk: Cory Perry and Nnaemeka Ekwelum at the South Side Community Art Center, Can You See Me? with SkyART, and Behold, Be Held at the Block Museum of Art, where she served as the 2020-2021 Interdisciplinary Curatorial Fellow. Most recently, she organized the exhibition Lawrence Agyei: DRILL at Blanc Gallery.

Dr. Byrd is the founder and editor of the Fashion and Race Syllabus and Black Fashion Archive, and has participated in speaking engagements with the Studio Museum in Harlem, Council of the Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), Google, Kering, and Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco. In her writing and public speaking capacity, she has interviewed the late André Leon Talley, Amy Sherald, and Mickalene Thomas. She is also the co-founder of Artists in the Room, a Black arts collective in St. Louis, Missouri, where she and her colleagues created opportunities for the city’s Black arts community to engage with Black artists and arts professionals who visited the city. To date, the collective has hosted Mickalene Thomas, Derek Fordjour, and Sanford Biggers.

Dr. Byrd is currently an editorial advisory board member for Bloomsbury Fashion Publishing and was a steering committee member for Chicago Fashion Lyceum’s 2022 symposium “Fashion at the Periphery.” She is the recipient of residencies from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Modern Ancient Brown Foundation, and has also received the Presidential Fellowship at Northwestern University and an inaugural Chicago Critic’s Table Fellowship at University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life. In 2024, she will join the Hyde Park Art Center as its inaugural Radicle Curator Resident.

View her CV here.

To book for speaking engagements or interviews, contact her here.