Contextual Material

Christine Checinska


Short Biography

Christine Checinska is the Victoria and Albert Museum’s inaugural Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion and Lead Curator of the Africa Fashion exhibition, opening June 2022. Prior to joining the V&A, Checinska worked as a womenswear designer, an academic, artist, and curator. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, London (2009) and is a Research Associate at VIAD, (Visual Identities in Art and Design), University of Johannesburg. Her creative practice and research explore the relationship between fashion, textiles, culture, and race. The cultural exchanges that result from movement and migration creating creolized cultural forms are recurring themes in Checinska’s work. She has published widely on these topics, most recently in “Spinning a Yarn of One’s Own,” in A Companion to Textile Cultures, Jennifer Harris (ed.), 2020 and “Re-Fashioning African Diasporic Masculinities,” in Fashion and Postcolonial Critique, Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (eds.), 2019. In 2016, she delivered the TedxTalk Disobedient Dress: Fashion as Everyday Activism. She was also on the advisory board of the 2021 Crafts Council Collect art fair. Checinska lives and works in London.