Nikki Shaner Bradford

Projects
About

I am an artist and writer who employs various media to conduct investigations in everyday life. I call this the medium of reality. My primary training is in fiction; as a visual artist, I tend to work in durational/private performance, photography, and buon fresco, or “true fresco.” I welcome inquiries about this, or anything else, at nikki@nikkishanerbradford.com.

For a proper bio, see below:

Nikki Shaner Bradford is an American artist and writer who lives and works between Paris and New York. A former editorial staffer at The New Yorker and The Paris Review, she takes an ethnographic approach to everyday life, conducting yearlong research sequences that culminate in narrative exhibitions and books.

In 2026, Shaner Bradford was awarded the Adrian Piper Research Archive Multidisciplinary Fellowship, the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, and a Beatrice S. Demers Foreign Language Fellowship, as well as residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine, US), Shakespeare & Company (Paris, FR), and Fondation des États-Unis (Paris, FR).

Prior visual and performance works have been supported by grants from the Brown Arts Institute and Marina Abramovic Institute, and hosted or exhibited at numerous galleries and institutions, including the List Art Center (US), Brown Arts Institute (US), WOLF (US), 59 Rivoli (France), and Reference Point (UK). Her writing has appeared in various magazines, including Granta, Mutt Art Review, The Paris Review Daily, SAND International, Astra Magazine, and Bookforum.

Shaner Bradford holds an MA from Brown University, MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and BA from Barnard College. She has taught performance and fiction workshops in the Theatre, Dance, and Media department at Harvard University and the Literary Arts department at Brown, where she is presently earning a practice-based PhD.