Writer, Oral Historian, Educator
Nicki Pombier is a writer, oral historian and parent who collaborates to bring the experiences of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) into public history through stories, films, and exhibits. She has worked with Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities since 2013 on multi-sensory exhibits in the US Capitol, the Pennsylvania State Capitol, and City Hall in Philadelphia, among others. As an independent oral historian, she created the TILL Living Legacy Project, a film to help staff working with people with IDD rethink their complexity and humanity, which won the 2015 Innovation Award from the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers. In 2013 she published a collaborative online collection of oral histories with self-advocates with Down syndrome, and from 2010-2013, she led several community engagement efforts at StoryCorps, including the National Teachers Initiative, which launched at the White House and featured ten broadcasts on National Public Radio.
Nicki has an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Science in the Foreign Service from Georgetown University. She teaches at Columbia University and The New School University, where she won the 2021 Distinguished University Teaching Award.
Her award-winning writing on practicing oral history across ability has been published or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals and books including Oral History Review, Cripping the Archive: Disability, Power and History (U of Illinois Press), and Research in Social Sciences and Disability (Emerald Publishing). As Founding Editor of Underwater New York, a platform for creative work inspired by the waterways of New York City, she has published the work of more than 200 writers, musicians, and artists since 2009, and was a fiction and poetry editor of SILENT BEACHES, UNTOLD STORIES: NEW YORK CITY’S FORGOTTEN WATERFRONT (Damiani, 2016.)
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her sons.
Header image taken on a research trip for The Bakken, August 2017, at the Garrison Dam, which was built by the Army Corps of Engineers from 1947-1954, drowning the towns of Independence, Elbowoods, Shell Creek, Lucky Mound, Nishu and Beaver Creek, flooding the rich bottomlands families had farmed for decades and lived on far longer, erasing the schools, shops, streets, cemeteries, hospitals, rodeos, everywhere that was home for hundreds, forcing evacuation and scattering communities on Fort Berthold Reservation. The dam shaped the river into lake, named without irony Lake Sakakawea for the woman whose knowledge saved Lewis and Clark. There's no mention on any dam placards of the towns that once were, now underwater.
Most of the photos on this site are my own, and others are used with attribution, gratitude and admiration for photographers Nura Qureshi, JJ Tiziou, Robin Michals, and Walter Hergt.