The Irvin D. Reid Honors College has named Nadiya I. Nacorda Loving, M.F.A., as one of their two pre-faculty fellows for the Pathway to Faculty (PTF) program. 

Nacorda Loving earned her master’s in art photography from Syracuse University in 2021. An artist, photographer and filmmaker, her work explores the nuances and entanglements of inheritance and themes of magic, affection, identity, motherhood, Blasian feminine interiority and subjectivity.

Her own lived experiences growing up in the United States as a daughter of migrants is a heavy source of inspiration. Her work is also informed by Black Feminist Theory, Feminist and Indigenous methodologies, Decolonial Theory, Afrofuturisms, and the broader histories of colonization and displacement.

Her first project as a PTF fellow will focus on the notion of intergenerational displacement, particularly as it relates to her own family’s history of exile during Apartheid to losing her family home in Detroit during the foreclosure crisis.

“I am particularly concerned with interrogating cycles within histories, both personal and collective, while deeply considering their impact over many generations,” she said.

Nacorda Loving is excited to return to her native Detroit and be a part of the research being conducted at Wayne State, particularly as an artist in the Honors College, which is deeply engaged across disciplines at the university.

“I am an artist that seeks to use my work as a way to ask questions and disrupt narrow, simplistic understandings of identity,” she said. “My hope is that viewers leave my work with more inquiry than they came with, and that those that are not historically represented in fine art, feel seen.”

Her work has been exhibited across the United States and featured in publications such as The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, and The Guardian. Nadiya has also presented her work through artist talks at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Stanford University, Brandeis University, and the University of Washington. She is a winner of the 2020 Lenscratch Student Prize, as well as a finalist of the 2019 Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward competition, the 2020 Lit List, and the 2021 Silver list.