Nzinga Simmons is an emerging curator and art history scholar based in Durham, North Carolina. She earned a B.A. in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently a third-year doctoral student in Art History & Visual Culture at Duke University. Her research focuses on contemporary Black artists working within the realm of new media ­– that is, making use of the internet, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), artificial intelligence (AI), and other forms of digital technologies in their artistic practice. In her research, she considers how these artists refuse the assumed neutrality of technology and conceptualize the digital realm as a context uniquely primed for the assertion of black futurity. Prior to her graduate studies, she curated UNBOUND, an exhibition examining the history of Black abstraction from the midcentury to the contemporary moment at the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Through her critical art writing and curatorial practice, Simmons aims to highlight the vast and significant contributions of underrepresented artists to the canon of American art.

Nzinga is supported by the Artistic Research Initiative (sponsored by the Mellon Foundation) as a 2023-2024 Fellow and co-instructor for Art of the MOOC: Colors, Bodies, Power.