Niki Lopez

Niki Lopez is an award-winning Afro-Latina, queer interdisciplinary artist, curator, cultural producer, teaching artist, and social practitioner based in South Florida. Through mixed-media reliefs, sculptural masks, assemblage, painting, installation, and community-centered experiences, her work explores identity, memory, spirituality, trauma, healing, resilience, belonging, and social justice.

Drawing from personal narrative, Afro-diasporic symbolism, ancestral memory, and lived experience, Lopez creates richly layered works that function as both visual storytelling and spaces for reflection. Her practice often incorporates vibrant color, fabric, cowrie shells, found objects, symbolic forms, and tactile surfaces. For Lopez, art is not simply an object or final product; it is a way to witness, process, connect, and create space for individual and collective transformation.

Since 2008, Lopez has curated and produced exhibitions, public programs, workshops, artist conversations, and culturally responsive community experiences throughout South Florida. Her curatorial and social practice brings artists, organizations, educators, young people, and community members together around subjects that are often difficult to name or discuss. Selected projects include SOIL: Where the Light Enters; Echoes of Empathy: Navigating the Baker Act Through Art; The Art of Justice; Sankofa Arts Project; Aya Arts Project; and her ongoing series of exhibitions and programs presented through What’s Your Elephant®.

Lopez is the founder and executive director of What’s Your Elephant®, a nonprofit arts organization and social-practice platform that uses creative expression, dialogue, exhibitions, workshops, and community engagement to address “the elephant in the room.” The organization creates intentional spaces in which art becomes a catalyst for awareness, healing, reflection, connection, and social change. Its programs explore mental health, identity, racial and social justice, grief, trauma, LGBTQ+ experiences, community wellness, and other issues that are frequently silenced or stigmatized.

For more than fourteen years, Lopez has also worked as a teaching artist, facilitating accessible arts experiences for children, adults, educators, and people with disabilities. Her approach centers process over perfection and invites participants to use creativity as a tool for self-discovery, expression, mindfulness, empowerment, and collective care.

Her work has been exhibited throughout South Florida and beyond, including exhibitions in New York and California. She has received numerous honors for her creative practice and community leadership, including the 2025 Nguzo Saba Award for Kuumba/Creativity, 2024 Commitment to a Cause Philanthropy Award, 2023 Pioneer of the Year Award, 2023 Women’s History Month recognition, and the Broward County Arts & Culture Visionaries Award.

Lopez is also the founder of Niki Lopez Creative, an independent creative agency providing visual communication, exhibition development, cultural programming, community engagement, and design services for artists, nonprofits, cultural organizations, and mission-driven initiatives.

Artist website:
https://nikilopez.art

What’s Your Elephant:
https://whatsyourelephant.org

Instagram:
https://instagram.com/nikilopez19
https://instagram.com/whatsyourelephant

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/nikilopezart

https://www.facebook.com/whatsyourelephant

Press:

https://nikilopez.art/press