Writer, Oral Historian, Educator
Nicki Pombier is a writer, oral historian, and public artist working at the intersection of disability, language and place.
Her memoir-in-progress, Mother Tongue, traces how her son’s disabilities refracted her understanding of language, history, and belonging. Across writing, oral history projects, and public history collaborations, she explores voice beyond speech and the intimate politics of care.
Nicki’s scholarship has been recognized by the Oral History Association and The New School. From 2020–2025, she taught at Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts program, where she co-developed Serious Play, expanding oral history through movement, memory, and performance. She is the founding editor of Underwater New York and a longtime collaborator with Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities.
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.