Erica Cardwell

Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic and educator based in Brooklyn and Toronto. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a New York State Council for Arts, Grant for Artists. Erica considers the consciousness and imaginations of people of color as a tool for social, spiritual, and collective movement. She centers Black feminist theory as her primary critical approach, and often writes about print and paper-making practices, archival media, and interdisciplinary performance. Her writing has appeared in ARTS. BLACK, Artsy, Art in America, Frieze, BOMB, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, CULTURED, and other publications. Most recently, her writing is included in the anthology Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism.  

Erica has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Queer Art Mentorship. She is on the editorial board of Radical Teacher Journal and a member of the International Art Critics Association. Erica received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first book, Wrong is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art will be published by The Feminist Press in March 2024. 

Research Interests

Creative nonfiction, auto-theory, life writing, lyric and fragmentation, intergenre, interdisciplinary studies, hybridity, art criticism, and self-study