When stories about Black women have been hidden, erased, or spoken over, the act of telling them authentically becomes a radical practice. In spaces shaped by colonial histories and sanitized narratives, reframing whose experiences are validated isn’t just creative work but cultural preservation.
Here’s Nicky Lawrence, a multidisciplinary artist, storyteller, and cultural voice whose work centers the lived realities of Black women across diasporic histories.
As a performer, writer, and creative force, she doesn’t merely recount memory, she activates it, turning personal truth into collective resonance.
Nicky’s artistic practice emerged from a deep engagement with her own experiences and those of the Black women who came before her. Her decade‑long project Ugly Black Woman, a blend of spoken word and music, specifically explores resilience, beauty, and the unfiltered emotional landscape of being a Black woman in the world.
She released this project in connection with UK Black History Month, and pulled threads from personal hardship, historical erasure, and communal triumph to elevate voices that are too often overlooked.
This work matters now more than ever. Contemporary conversations about identity, belonging, and representation increasingly demand that Black cultural makers assert agency over how their stories are told.
For too long, the mainstream narrative around the Black diaspora has simplified, sanitized, or silenced women’s experiences. But Nicky’s work actively counters that by inviting audiences into honest, sometimes painful, yet beautiful reflections on history and self‑hood.
As founder and host of The Ugly Black Woman Podcast, she brings cultural memory into present‑day dialogue reminding her listeners that Canada’s history with slavery and anti‑Blackness is part of a larger diasporic story, and that reclaiming that history is crucial to cultural preservation.
Nicky animates culture rather than just reflect it. Through performance, storytelling, and community engagement, she invites others to see themselves in the narrative, to reclaim their ancestry, and to weave their lived experiences into the broader cultural tapestry.
Her work grounds us in the fact that cultural preservation isn’t passive, instead it is an act of power, and it begins with telling the truth without apology.
