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Diana Baird N'Diaye, Ph.D.

Quiltmaker

  Washington, D.C., , United States    

Black Diaspora Quilt History Project

Senior Curator and Cultural Heritage Specialist, Smithsonian; Visual Artist/ maker. Leads African American Craft Initiative, The Will to Adorn: African American Style and Identity, and Crafts of African Fashion.
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Dr. Diana Baird N’Diaye is a multidisciplinary textile artist, folklife researcher, curator and transcontinental arts advocate who combines decades of experience both as a researcher and curator of African and African diaspora expressive culture. She considers her teaching as a vital aspect of her participatory art practice. N’Diaye’s art training began with sewing and needlework instruction from her Caribbean great aunts; In high school she became a student of African American couturiere Zelda Wynn Valdes, and worked as a mender in her mother’s dry cleaning store. Using her own transnational personal and family history as a starting point, she uses digital photography and stitching to create tableaus that interrogate the transatlantic identities/relationships and reconnections created in the aftermath of colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade, as sources of both trauma and joy, disfunction and healing. Diana N’Diaye’s quilts are represented in the Michigan State University Museum collection; her wearable artworks are in several private collections. She is the founder of the Smithsonian’s African American Craft Initiative, the Will to Adorn, a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, an award-winning writer, a board member of the Center for Craft, and a Gateway Studio artist. 

I am an Interdisciplinary Visual Artist/Maker, and cultural scholar. I developed and lead the African American Crafts Initiative, Principal investigator and Curator of the Will to Adorn: African American Dress and the Aesthetics of Identity. Awarded Smithsonian Secretary's Research Prize for Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival; Co-authored with Olivia Cadaval and Sojin Kim. Curated Smithsonian Folklife Festival programs and exhibitions on Senegal, Maroon communities, African immigrant culture, Bermuda, Haiti, the African roots of Virginia’s culture, African American Style (the Will to Adorn). Coordinated program components on fashion for the Silk Road and Mali Festivals. Directed the Smithsonian's participation in the South African National Cultural Heritage Training and Technology Program, in partnership with Michigan State University, the Chicago Historical Society, and several South African cultural institutions. Fellow of the American Folklore Society, Executive Board of the Center for Craft, and an advisor to several cultural and humanities institutions including UNESCO.

Specialties: ethnoaesthetics, cultural representation; heritage education; community-based tourism and cultural policy. African and African Diaspora folklife and ethnicity, craft and design.

Ethnic background/tribal affiliation:

Black

Educational background:

BA, Anthropology, New York University
MA, Anthropology, Stony Brook University
Ph.D., Anthropology and Visual Studies, Union Institute & University

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