Nicki Pombier
Affiliations:
Adjunct Faculty, Serious Play: Oral History and the Art of Story
About
Nicki Pombier is an oral historian, writer, and educator. She brings an oral historical approach to collaborative work across disciplines, with a particular interest in how the process and products of these collaborations reflect, and enact, desires for change.
As an oral historian, Nicki has created and curated multimedia exhibits online and in public spaces, and designed and produced educational and experimental films. Presently, she is an Artist Resident with The Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, using an arts- and oral history-based approach to document first-person experiences of institutionalization. Her work with Temple began in 2014 on A Fierce Kind of Love, a multifaceted arts-based project on the intellectual disability rights movement in Pennsylvania, for which Nicki co-curated content for a multimedia exhibit online and in the rotunda of the Pennsylvania State Capitol and Philadelphia’s City Hall (Here. Stories from Selinsgrove Center and KenCrest Services). In 2015, she produced An Accidental Documentary for Oral History Summer School, an experimental film drawing on personal and archival oral histories to teach a history of intellectual disability. From 2013-2104, she designed and produced the TILL Living Legacy Project, an educational film and curriculum designed to engage human services staff in rethinking the complexity and humanity of people with intellectual disabilities, which won the 2015 Innovation Award from the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers. In 2013, she produced an online multimedia collection of stories from self-advocates with Down syndrome, “Nothing About Us Without Us.” From 2010-2013, she led several community engagement efforts at the national nonprofit organization, StoryCorps.
Nicki is the Founding Editor of Underwater New York, an arts project of creative work inspired by the waterways of New York City and the objects submerged within them. Since its founding in 2009, Underwater New York has published the work of over 200 writers, artists and musicians, and has convened dozens of programs bringing audiences to the literal, liminal and imagined edges of all five boroughs of New York City. In 2016, Nicki and UNY were the literary editors of SILENT BEACHES, UNTOLD STORIES: NEW YORK CITY’S FORGOTTEN WATERFRONTS (Damiani 2016) with author Elizabeth Albert. In 2018, Underwater New York partnered with Works on Water to co-host a pilot artists residency on Governors Island, a partnership and residency that continues in 2019. Nicki is an organizing member of Works on Water, a group of artists and curators dedicated to artworks, theatrical performances, conversations, workshops and site-specific experiences that explore diverse artistic investigations of water in the urban environment.
Nicki teaches in the Drama BFA program at the New School University College of Performing Arts (courses include Narrative Analysis, Dramatic Structure and Style, Writing and Orality, and Documentary Playwriting) and offers workshops and presentations to a wide range of audiences on applying oral history in diverse contexts. She has a Bachelor of Science in the Foreign Service from Georgetown University, a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University. More about Nicki’s work can be found at nickipombier.com