Dr. Christine Checinska is an artist, curator and writer who worked as a fashion designer before expanding into academia and curating.
She studied Fashion/Textile Design at the University of the West of England, graduating with a BA (Hons) in 1986, and then completed an MA in Fashion at the University for the Creative Arts in 2002. Her PhD, ‘Colonizin’ in Reverse: The Creolised Aesthetic of the Windrush Generation’, was awarded by Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies, London in 2000. Between 2013 and 2015 she was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of East London and then an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg VIAD. Her research – situated at the meeting point between material culture and contemporary art – hones in on the cultural exchanges that occur as a result of movement and migration; her ongoing interest being the correlation between personal history and received history.
Prior to becoming The Stuart Hall Library’s second Animateur, Checinska collaborated with Iniva to organise the symposium ‘Second Skins’. Between 2014 and 2015 she took her place as the Stuart Hall Library Animateur and organised the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group: a forum for creative practitioners and thinkers who work with cloth. She used materials from the Stuart Hall Library as a departure point from which to discuss the portrayal of black masculinity at the Black Portraiture Conference in Florence in 2015. Alongside Iniva, Checinska also helped to plan a Goldsmiths event held at the Victoria and Albert museum in London in 2013, where she presented ‘Second Skins: cloth, difference and the art of transformation’.
Her publications include: ‘Social Fabric’, in The Handbook of Textile Culture, edited by Jan Jefferies, Hazel Clark and Diana Wood Conroy; ‘Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas’, in Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today, edited by Jessica Hemmings; ‘Second Skins: Cloth, Difference and the Art of Transformation’, in Image and Text, edited by Leora Farber and Anne-Marie Tully; and ‘Reconfiguring Diasporic Identities’ in Beyond Borders, edited by John Hutnyk.
Christine Checinska is based in London. Her recent publications include Social Fabric in The Handbook of Textile Culture Janis Jefferies, Hazel Clark and Diana Wood Conroy (eds.) Bloomsbury Publications, 2015; Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas in Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today Jessica Hemmings (ed) Bloomsbury Publications, 2015, Second Skins: Cloth, Difference and the Art of Transformation in Image and Text, Leora Farber and Anne-Marie Tully (eds.), University of Johannesburg, 2014, and Reconfiguring Diasporic Identities in Beyond Borders, John Hutnyk (ed.), Pavement Books, 2012.