Kiyan Williams

Kiyan Williams is a multidisciplinary artist from Newark, NJ who works fluidly across sculpture, performance, painting, and video. They often work with dirt, sediment, and debris as material and metaphor to unearth Diaspora histories and trans/gressive subjectivity. Kiyan earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and is completing an MFA in Visual Art at Columbia University. They have performed/exhibited work across the country and internationally at venues including: SculptureCenter, The Jewish Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Dixon Place, La Mama Experimental Theater Club, SFMOMA and more.

Kiyan’s honors and awards include the EMERGENYC fellowship at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU, Astraea Foundation Global Arts Fund, Stanford Arts Award, and the Gates Millennium Scholarship. They were selected to participate in the 2019 In Practice: Other Objects emerging artist exhibition at SculptureCenter and are among the inaugural cohort of artists commissioned by The Shed, a new cultural space in NYC. In 2018 they were invited to re-perform Bruce Nauman’s “Wall-Floor Positions” at MoMA and PS1.