Marilyn Nance

Marilyn Nance (born November 12, 1953), also known as Soulsista, is an American multimedia artist known for work focusing on exploring human connections, African-American spirituality, and the use of technology in storytelling.

Nance's photojournalism has been published in Life, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Essence, and Newsday, which took place from January 15 to February 12, 1977. The festival centered around the themes, "Revival, resurgence, propagation, and protection of black and African cultural values and civilization," and the North American delegation included Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Barkley Hendricks, Stevie Wonder and Sun Ra, and the writers Louise Meriwether and Audre Lorde. Over the course of the month-long event, her first trip outside of the U.S., the Black Indians of New Orleans, Oyotunji African Village in Sheldon, South Carolina, and carnivals in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1995, Nance became a digital pioneer, developing her soulsista.com website. In 1997, she developed a web app prototyping Ifá (Yoruba) divination, and in 1999 she curated a digital project for the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, putting online more than 500 images of nineteenth-century African Americans Nance went on to become a technology specialist in the New York City public school system, helping teachers and their students use technology as a tool for lifelong learning.

Nance gave a lecture on her work to the Library of Congress in 2004. In 2016, she digitized and printed all her images from FESTAC '77. was hailed as a significant cultural document by The New York Times, and The New Yorker where Julian Lucas described it as "a stunning yearbook of the Black world that is sure to induce envy even in those who weren't alive in 1977." In 2023, Marilyn Nance was a lecturer for the Scholl Lecture Series at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, to comment and expand on her publication Last Day in Lagos.

Publications Rosenblum, Naomi, A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville, 1997, 1989, 2007, 2019)

Group exhibitions Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1991 African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, Smithsonian, 2012, online Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, National Gallery of Art, 2025

Awards 1987: New York State Council on the Arts Grant 1991: Finalist, W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography, for her body of work on African American spirituality 2024: Honorary Fellowship, The Royal Photographic Society

Collections Smithsonian Institution's Smithsonian American Art Museum The Library of Congress's Prints & Photographs Division holds some of her work from the 1970s and 1980s. Museum of Fine Arts Houston Brooklyn Museum