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

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

Nikki received her MA in Museum Studies from the University of East Anglia. Her PhD was a collaborative doctoral award between the University of Brighton and the British Museum. 

Her doctoral research investigated 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.

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.