Nyakier Buong
Nyakier Buong is a South Sudanese interdisciplinary artist, emerging curator, and international model based in London, UK. With a Bachelor of Science in Biological Anthropology from the University of Calgary, her practice brings together contemporary art, cultural inquiry, and lived experience.
Her curatorial work focuses on creating space for artists to share their stories with dignity, complexity, and agency, including experiences that are often overlooked, misunderstood, or difficult to communicate. Alongside curating, her creative practice spans installation, writing, and film, exploring identity, representation, cultural memory, and the human experiences that connect us.
My Story
My creative practice is shaped by an ongoing interest in how people experience the world, how their stories are represented, and whose perspectives are given space to be heard.
Born in a refugee camp during the Sudanese civil wars and raised in Canada, I grew up navigating questions of identity, belonging, and cultural representation. My background as a South Sudanese refugee informs my approach to storytelling, but it is also my training in Biological Anthropology that shapes how I engage with culture, human experience, and the complexities of individual and collective histories.
I approach curating as a way of bringing artists, ideas, and experiences into conversation. I am particularly interested in work that engages with real-life experiences, personal histories, and subjects that can be difficult to discuss. My aim is to create spaces where artists can represent themselves on their own terms, beyond reductive narratives, while ensuring their experiences are approached with dignity, care, and humanity. I see artworks not simply as objects to be displayed, but as expressions of lived experience, cultural knowledge, and ways of understanding the world.
In 2026, I independently conceived, curated, and organised Ethnographies of War: Stories of the Displaced, a public exhibition in Toronto bringing together artists whose lives and family histories have been shaped by war, displacement, migration, and cultural memory. Alongside my curatorial role, I presented my own installation, Stories That Never Made the Big Screen, a two-channel video installation built around interviews with my mother and uncle. Their testimonies explored experiences and histories often left out of mainstream narratives, including child marriage, famine, illness in refugee camps, foreign oil companies’ interference, and political displacement. The work reflects my interest in preserving family histories as cultural records and creating space for stories that might otherwise remain unheard. Developing the exhibition and contributing my own artwork allowed me to bring together my background in anthropology, my personal history, and my commitment to ethical storytelling.
My creative practice also extends into film and writing. I wrote the script and helped direct Guɔ̱p mi̱ gɔaa , a short film exploring my relationship with my skin colour and experiences of colourism. Accompanying the film, I wrote a Substack article reflecting on the insecurities I had carried about my complexion, where those feelings came from, and the process of coming to terms with them. Together, the film and writing became a way to examine how personal insecurities can be shaped by wider cultural attitudes and experiences, while creating space for greater self-understanding and compassion. The title, Guɔ̱p mi̱ gɔaa, meaning “Beautiful Skin” in Nuer, connects the work to my language and cultural heritage. These projects reflect my broader interest in using creative work to explore complex personal and social subjects through honesty, vulnerability, and lived experience.
I am continuing to develop my curatorial and artistic practice through new projects, collaborations, and interdisciplinary approaches. Across this work, I remain interested in telling real stories, making space for perspectives that are often overlooked, and approaching complex subject matter in ways that preserve the dignity and humanity of the people whose experiences are being shared.