Christine Checinska

Christine Checinska’s creative practice as an artist/writer/curator examines the relationship between cloth, culture and race. The cultural exchanges that occur as a result of movement and migration, creating creolised cultural forms, are her recurring themes. Her PhD was awarded by Goldsmiths, London, in 2009. She completed a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of East London in 2015. During this period became the second Stuart Hall Library Animateur, at Iniva, London, setting up the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group. She is currently an Associate Researcher at VIAD, University of Johannesburg.

In 2016 she delivered the TEDxTalk Disobedient Dress: Fashion as Everyday Activism and installed her solo exhibition The Arrivants at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg. Her publications include Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas in Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today, Jessica Hemmings (ed) Bloomsbury Publications, 2015, and At Home with Vanley Burke, Image & Text, no. 29, 2017. In 2018 she edited an African Diasporas special issue of Textile, Taylor and Francis Publications. Christine is currently the Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion at the V&A Museum London.

Read Christine’s interview with Haute Fashion Africa here.

Read Christine’s editorial for the special issue of Textile here.

Watch Christine’s TEDxTalk here.