Friar

Tayler Ava Friar is a writer, TEDx speaker, art historian, and global communications specialist with previous roles at The United Nations, World Bank, and Google. She is also the founder of ART|unknown. - a platform that explores the intersection of art, black voices and the SDGs.

With a deep commitment to reexamining histories from a decolonized lens, Ms. Friar is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Cape Town. Her thesis is entitled “Black sexual politics and the erotic: The intersection of gender politics and sexuality in contemporary visual art in Africa” which has been partially published with Aix-Marseille University in Provence, France.

As a Creative Knowledge Resources Fellow, her interests include the politics of visual culture, womxn leadership, the decolonization of art, and climate action. Her most recent lecture series was entitled “Art, Theory, and Society” which focused on various histories of representation of the black female form from The Belle Époque to contemporary contexts. Ms. Friar is a contributing writer for Business Insider and has been invited to be a TEDx speaker in November 2022 in Mexico. Finally, she can be seen as a feature in Vogue Magazine’s November 2020 issue, speaking to the importance of black voices in the 2020 US elections.

In her spare time, she can be found in that cafe you never noticed, practicing kizomba, painting, or working on her yoga postures. She lives in between Paris and San Miguel de Allende, but is proudly from Oakland.