DR CHRISTINE CHECINSKA
BA Fashion and Textile Design, University of the West of England in Bristol (UWE Bristol) (UK); MA Surrey Institute of Art & Design (UK); PhD Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, London (UK). Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, University of East London, London (UK). Research Fellow Yale Centre for British Art (USA).
Dr Christine Checinska is a British artist, designer, curator & storyteller whose creative practice examines the relationship between cloth, culture and race where the creolised cultural forms that occur as a result of movement and migration are recurring themes. In 2016, Checinska delivered the TEDxTalk ‘Disobedient Dress: Fashion as Everyday Activism’ and installed a solo exhibition The Arrivants at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg (UJ), South Africa. Checinska has built on these themes in her current role as Senior Curator Africa and Diaspora: Textiles and Fashion, and Lead Curator of Africa Fashion at the V&A Museum, London, UK’s international touring exhibition Africa Fashion. She is a member of the Costume Institute at the Met’s Advisory Committee for the 2025 show Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. Dr Checinska also became the second Stuart Hall Library Animateur, at Iniva, London, setting up the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group.
Checinska has exhibited work in the group shows The Missing Thread, Somerset House, London, 2023-2024, and Folded Life, Johanne Jacobs Museum, Zurich (2021). She was a co-curator of Makers Eye: Stories of Craft, Crafts Council Gallery, London (2021).
Checinska’s publications include Africa Fashion, V&A Publications (2022), which received an Honourable Mention for the R. L. Shep Memorial Book Award (2023), ‘Material Practices of Caribbean Artists Throughout the Diaspora’, in Crafting Kinship: A Visual Journal of Black Caribbean Makers, Marlene Barnett (ed.)(2024), ‘Joy Labinjo an Introduction’ in Joy Labinjo, Anomie & Tiwani Contemporary (2024),‘Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas’ in the edited volume Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today (Bloomsbury, 2015), and ‘At Home with Vanley Burke’, Image & Text 29 (2017). Checinska is a co-editor of the Fashion Theory special issue ‘Fashioning Global Africa Independence to Now’ (2025), with Elisabeth Murray. She is also co-editor of the Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of World Textiles, Volume 4: Colour with Bharti Parmar, Nicola Stylianou and Rikka Raissanen, Bloomsbury Publications, forthcoming. In 2018 Checinska edited a special issue of Textile 16(2), titled ‘Aesthetics of Blackness? Cloth, Culture, and the African Diasporas’, that considers the relationship between cloth, culture, and race from the perspective of the African Diasporas across the Caribbean, USA, West Africa, South Africa, and Britain. Other textual outputs include ‘Cut & Mix: Collage, Creolisation and African Diaspora Aesthetics’, Mobilities 9 (2020) and ‘Hylan Booker: Grace, Romance, Distinction, and the House of Worth’, in Africa’s Fashion Diasporas, Elizabeth Way (ed.) (Yale Publications 2024).
Dr Christine Checinska joined VIAD in 2013.
