Nigel Poor

For many years Nigel Poor's work has explored the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. She is interested in the portrait and self-portrait and explores this vastly mined area through unconventional means, using materials such as fingerprints and hands, washed books, objects people have thrown out, human hair and dryer lint, flies and dead insects collected from the front of her car as indexical markers of human presences and experience. She is exploring the troubling question of how to document life and what is worthy of preservation. The premise and methodologies of some of her projects may sound ridiculous, but since our lives are more often influenced, constructed, and dictated by the ludicrous than by the sublime, she believes it is our job to make use of it all: the tangible and intangible, the concrete and the poetic, the serious and absurd. Her work, as a visual artist, has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and can be found in museum collections including the SFMOMA, the M.H. de Young Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Nigel is a professor of photography at California State University, Sacramento.

In 2011, Nigel got involved with San Quentin State Prison as a volunteer teacher for Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project). This experience changed the direction of her solo studio practice. In 2017, she co-founded the prison-based podcast Ear Hustle, which reaches millions of listeners and has earned a Peabody prize and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, among numerous other awards. She is the author of The San Quentin Project, published by Aperture and co-author of This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life, published by Crown Publishing Group, which was the San Francisco Public Library’s One-City-One-Book selection in 2022.