Project responsibility: Working with project partners to conduct a national review of African and Caribbean collections in Scottish museums.

Research interests: African collecting and exhibition histories; international museum collaborations; histories of museum training programmes; museums and decolonisation

Nikki holds an MA in Museum Studies from the University of East Anglia and has recently submitted her PhD, an AHRC collaborative doctoral award between the University of Brighton and the British Museum. Her doctoral research investigates histories of cooperative exchange between museums in the UK, Nigeria and Ghana from the 1940s to the present day and involved extensive archival and oral history research across Nigeria, Ghana, the UK and US.

She specialises in Nigerian collections and their histories of collection and curation in the context of mid-twentieth century decolonisation, and theory around collaborative museum processes between Africa and Europe.

Nikki has been working with African collections in UK museums since 2014, including the British Museum, Brighton Museum, and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. In 2019, she completed a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art. Before taking up her current role as Project Curator, Nikki was researching African collections as part of the Devolving Restitution project at the Hunterian, University of Glasgow, and prior to this was an Assistant Curator at National Museums Scotland.

Nikki was Membership Officer for the Museum Ethnographers Group from 2016-2019 and has been on the organising committee of several conferences and symposiums, including ‘Exhibiting the Experience of Empire’ at the British Museum (2018). She has taught on courses at the University of Brighton and has been invited to present her research at the University of Zurich and University of St Andrews.