Nikesha Breeze is an international artist working across a diverse range of media—including oil painting, clay and bronze sculpture, installation, performance art, and film. Breeze’s layered, immersive works draw on African diasporic history, reclamation, and memorial practices. Breeze’s practice employs multiple materials and methodologies. Honoring ancestral memory and archival research to revive stories long erased from the global narrative. Nikesha’s work interfaces directly with communities, descendants, and living stories of grief, power, presence, visibility, and erasure.

Originally from Portland, Oregon, Nikesha Breeze now lives and works in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico, on the unceded land of the Taos Pueblo People. As an African American descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone and Assyrian-American immigrants from Iran, Nikesha’s multicultural heritage infuses her work with a dynamic range of perspectives. Nikesha’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as The Equal Justice Initiative Freedom Monument, MoCADA Museum of Brooklyn, The Albuquerque Museum, Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, the NkinKyim Museum of Ghana, the Sydney Biennale, as well as at fine art galleries and art fairs around the globe.

Breeze’s innovative approach to historical storytelling and immersive memorial work has garnered widespread international acclaim. In 2026, Breeze was commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney in Sydney Australia to create Living Histories, a monumental 6000 sqft installation re-enlivening hundreds of first hand-accounts of formerly enslaved individuals in the United States through sculptural installation, immersive site specific art, music, voice recordings and live performance. In 2025 Yale University commissioned Breeze in a multi year monument commission, working directly with the community and descendants as an appointed Research scholar to design and create a permanent public monument honoring and acknowledging the university’s historical ties to slavery and the slave trade. In 2024 Nikesha was commissioned to create an expansive hand-cast bronze memorial of 108 Death Masks in collaboration with Master African bronze casters, for the permanent collection of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, a breathtaking work honoring the six million lives lost in enslavement in the United States.