Everlyn Nicodemus is a Tanzanian-born artist, writer, and curator, based in Edinburgh, Scotland.[4]
Early life and career
Nicodemus initially enrolled in teacher training school, but eloped to marry a Swedish economist working in Tanzania.[1] The pair moved to Sweden in 1973, where, influenced by her experiences of everyday racism, she enrolled in Stockholm University in 1978 to study social anthropology.[5]
While back in Tanzania doing fieldwork, Nicodemus started making art in response to her discomfort with anthropology. This quickly led to a solo exhibition of paintings and poems at the National Museum of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam in 1980.[5]
After divorcing her first husband, Nicodemus married Kristian Romare, a Swedish art historian, with whom she moved to Edinburgh in 2008.[2]
Her work includes paintings, collages, mixed-media assemblages, and poetry, and has been informed by racism, trauma, PTSD, and recovery.[6] She completed her PhD on African Modern Art and Black Cultural Trauma at Middlesex University in 2012.[7]
Nicodemus won the Freelands Foundation Award in 2022,[3] which supported the first retrospective of her work, at the National Galleries of Scotland, from September 2024 to May 2025.[4] Her painting Självporträtt, Åkersberga was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2022,[8] and became the first painted self-portrait by a black female artist in the gallery's collection.[2]
