Sonya Dyer

Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London, and is a Somerset House Studios Resident.

Dyer’s practice explores how subjectivities and alliances are formed across cultures and temporalities, creating possible futures. She previously ran the …And Beyond Institute for Future Research, a peripatetic think tank creating possible futures.

Recent projects include Rewriting The Future, Site Gallery (2019), Another World is Possible, CAMP, Copenhagen (2018), Familiar Strangers, The Luminary, St Louis, (2018), Or, Dark Fecundity, The Centre for Afrofuturist Studies, USA (2018), The Claudia Jones Space Station (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, 2017) and Into the Future (Primary, Nottingham, 2015).

As a writer and commentator on art and culture, Dyer has contributed to numerous publications including Frieze, Arts UK, Contemporary &, a-n online and Petunia, in addition to her academic writing.

Hailing Frequencies Open (HFO), her current body of work, intersects the Greek myth of Andromeda, the dubious legacy of HeLa cells and actor Nichelle Nicols’ pioneering work in diversifying the NASA astronaut pool in the 1970s as the starting point for an exploration of Black female subjectivities within narratives of the future. HFO combines social justice with speculation, fantasy with the political.

Dyer is a previous artsadmin Artist Bursary Scheme recipient, and was a Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program Fellow.