Nekisha Durrett is a mixed-media artist who employs the visual language of mass media to bring forward histories that objects, places, and words embody, but are not often celebrated. Her expansive practice includes public art, social practice, installation, murals, painting, sculpture and design. Durrett is invested in foregrounding issues of Black life while creating a space where fantasy, imagination, and history converge.

Nekisha Durrett currently lives and works in Washington, DC where she creates bold and playful large scale installations and public art that aim to make the ordinary enchanting and awe inspiring while summoning subject matter that is often underrepresented or overlooked in visual culture. She earned her BFA at The Cooper Union in New York City and MFA from The University of Michigan School of Art and Design as a Horace H. Rackham Fellow. Durrett has exhibited her work throughout the Washington, DC area and nationally. She is currently a finalist in the National Portrait Gallery’s prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and is featured in The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today exhibition. Recent installations include: Up ‘til Now, a freestanding, solar powered sculpture that evokes the history of Washington, DC’s landscape and architecture, in Washington’s Golden Triangle neighborhood; “Messages for the City” in collaboration with For Freedoms in Times Square, New York; and a wall mounted public sculpture in the Liberty City community of Miami, Florida made in collaboration with conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas;  and a permanent installation on the glass-walled vestibule in the newly renovated Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in Washington. Magnolia, a series of leaves perforated with the names of women murdered by law enforcement, was currently on view in her solo exhibition at Cody Gallery at Marymount University and the Atlanta Biennial at Atlanta Contemporary. Durrett is currently in production on a large-scale, permanent sculpture in Arlington, VA.