Nora is an urban swimmer, writer, performance artist, educator, and activist based in Brooklyn / Lenapehoking. Her art explores intersections of archiving, environmental investigation, and spatial disruption. Recent public artworks—Last Street End in Gowanus (2021), Land Use Intervention Library (2022), and Open Water (ongoing)—focus on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed, post-industrial waterfront spaces.

Nora works at the City University of New York and is a long time volunteer at Interference Archive. She has co-curated several exhibitions at Interference including the summer 2022 show: Our Streets! Our City! Public Space and Self Determination in NYC. Nora has organized propaganda parties, media-making workshops, public events, and street performances across NYC in collaboration with other artists and organizations including: Undocumented Women’s Fund, Women’s Strike NYC, Environmental Performance Agency, Decolonize This Place, ABC No Rio, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, Next Epoch Seed Library, No North BK Fracked Gas Pipeline Coalition, Brooklyn Eviction Defense, Mobile Print Power. Her book, The Social Movement Archive, co-authored with Jen Hoyer, was published in 2021. She lives in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

Website: https://noraalmeida.com
Check out her recent book: The Social Movement Archive

PROJECT : OPEN WATER

Open Water is a site-specific research, oral history, and public art project about swimming and flooding. The project involves: swimming with people and groups in urban locations in and outside of the United States; conducting oral histories with swimmers and the public; co-facilitating shoreline encounters and stewardship events; and producing multimedia artwork in collaboration with community members and other artists. 

The purpose of Open Water is to explore / perform swimming as an embodied research method and examine political, cultural, ecological, and economic dimensions of water relationships and swimming practices across time and geography. The project incorporates the perspective of people who swim, who can’t swim, who have survived floods, and who have observed how industrial pollution, extraction, colonialism, and urban development have impacted waterfront spaces and people. 

In 2023-2024, with support from Culture Push, I will bring Open Water to Coney Island Creek and develop a new phase of the project called, Creek: Two Cavities of the Heart in collaboration with the videographer iki nakagawa. We will integrate elements of Open Water with iki’s project thoughts for tomorrow, movements for today (tftmft). Creek: Two Cavities of the Heart surfaces interactions and intersections between Open Water and tftmft and seeks to understand care practices and transcorporeal embodiment––between human bodies, water bodies, and more than human species–in the context of climate crisis.