Nyssa Chow is an oral historian, multidisciplinary artist, and writer.
Her documentary art practice engages prose, audio, moving images/film, installation, and visual storytelling.
She is core faculty at the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia, Lecturer English Department at Princeton University, Research Affiliate at MIT Media Labs (Poetic Justice Group led by artist Ekene Ijeoma), and is co-director of the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project at Columbia University (I.N.C.I.T.E). She is Lead Artist Facilitator for the 2021 DocX Labs at The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, co-created with documentarians Martine Granby and Stephanie Owens.
She was the 2019-2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts. She has served as Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton University, as Visiting Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and as Visiting Assistant Professor in the BFA Film Program at Purchase College. She was the 2018 Recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for Literary Oral History. The immersive literary oral history project ‘The Story of Her Skin’ won the Columbia University Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Chow has collaborated with filmmakers and artists, most recently with Jennifer Wen Ma on her exhibition ‘An Inward Sea’ for the New Britain Museum of Art. Chow has conducted oral histories on behalf of arts institutions such as the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and has lectured widely on the intersection of art and oral history; embodied knowledge and listening; and literary oral history. Her most recent work Trace: A Memorial was exhibited in ‘How We Remember’ at the Miriam and Ira D Wallach Art Gallery in New York City.
Born and raised in Trinidad, she is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Film program and Columbia University’s Oral History Masters Program.
This semester, she is co-teaching Arts in the Invisible City: Race, Policy, Performance with D. Vance Smith (English).
