Bio
Zsudayka Nzinga is a fine artist, curator, and educator from Aurora, CO, currently residing in Washington, DC. Her research-based practices explore American history and the impact of textile labor.
Nzinga began her career as a spoken word artist. She created an art festival in her hometown and began exploring visual art. She taught art for over 20 years in diverse classroom settings, created art programs for nonprofits, and developed educator training initiatives focused on neuroaesthetics and classroom practices. She earned her MFA in painting from MICA in 2025.
Nzinga’s artwork has been showcased in museums such as The Phillips Collection, PG African American History Museum, and the National Liberty Museum. She has multiple permanent works with the National Institute of Health, including an installation, and paintings acquired and commissioned by the National Human and Civil Rights Museum and the Central Intelligence Agency Museum. Her works have been placed in law firms, investment agencies, banks, and schools around the country, as well as shown at US Embassies around the world. She was voted one of the best in show at the AAKA Fair in Paris in 2024 and showed at SCOPE for Miami Art Week and the Ferrari Art Fair in 2025.
She is a mother of three and the wife of artist James Stephen Terrell.
Artist Statement
Rooted in research, Zsudayka Nzinga is interested in examining issues related to American labor systems and their historical and ongoing impact on the communities and cultures of the diaspora in America. Sourcing traditional American folklore and myth, her work creates fantasy interior, exterior, and figurative spaces from hand-printed and painted materials.
Seated in the historical language of textile labor, Nzinga’s practice begins with water, considering birth and American port cities. She uses hand-dyed muslin and canvas, hand-marbled paper and canvas, batik wax reduction printing, screen printing, relief printing, ink drawings, artist-designed digital printed fabric and paper, and acrylic paint to create futurist historical paintings that examine American history and simultaneously imagine a better future through informed escape.
Her print work investigates the use of iconography as design, employing symbolic images as the storytelling vehicle to interpret how history shapes American identity and culture. Nzinga is interested in drawing parallels between Reconstruction-Era America, the present, and possible futures through fashion design, interior design, architecture, and agriculture. Her current work explores themes of developing spiritual practices and personal concepts of self-actualized existence as acts of resistance to the rigor of labor systems. Her drawings, paintings, printwork, collaged tapestries, and works on paper challenge viewers to examine the long-term impact of these systems and to envision new ways to create culture and community in the future.
