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. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, Cultured, Teen Vogue, and Frieze, and across exhibition catalogs, academic journals, and books. She has provided commentary on Black fashion history and visual culture to various media, including Essence, Elle, and CNN.

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 presentation of Dionne Alexander’s wigs for Lil’ Kim and a tracksuit installation with works by Telfar, Wales Bonner, and Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. Dr. Byrd’s previous projects include Lawrence Agyei: DRILL at Blanc Gallery, All of Living is Risk: Cory Perry and Nnaemeka Ekwelum at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, and Behold, Be Held at the Block Museum of Art, where she served as the 2020-2021 Interdisciplinary Curatorial Fellow. Most recently, she organized Visual Legacies: Photographs by Ellie Lee Weems at Haggerty Museum of Art.

Dr. Byrd is the founder and editor of the Fashion and Race Syllabus and Black Fashion Archive, and has participated in speaking engagements with Getty, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Council of the Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), and Google. 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 an editorial advisory board member for Bloomsbury Fashion Publishing and on the programming committee for the 2025 Pop Conference. In 2025, she will co-organize Mahogany @ 50, a year-long events series in Chicago that will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film Mahogany via screenings, conversations, and a symposium. She is the recipient of residencies from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Modern Ancient Brown Foundation, the Presidential Fellowship at Northwestern University, and an inaugural Chicago Critic’s Table Fellowship at University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life. She is also the inaugural Radicle Curator Resident at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.

Dr. Byrd is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture Studies in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Art and Art History. She has also lectured at Washington University in St. Louis and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is working on two book projects. In Loving Memory: Black Performance and the Sartorial Politics of Mourning explores the ways that Black people perform mourning through clothing, textiles, and adornment. The project connects an array of objects such as Rest in Peace T-shirts, performance, and contemporary art to expand the archive of Black postmortem visual history. Dr. Byrd’s second project is a book of essays titled Notes on Black Fashioning, which draws on a range of rituals, social, and political issues to creatively explore embodiment and popular culture.

Dr. Byrd works between Austin and Chicago.

View her CV here.

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