Tayler Ava Friar is a PhD fellow in art history at the University of Cape Town focusing on the eroticization of black bodies as resistance in African contemporary art. She has held various positions with the United Nations, the World Bank and Google. As a writer, she is a contributor at Business Insider and has been featured in Vogue Magazine speaking on black consciousness. Her passion for the decolonization of global histories inspires both her academic and political involvement in the creative arts. She is the founder of ART|unknown. – a multidisciplinary creative agency that explores the intersection of art, black voices and the Sustainable Development Goals. Her most recent exhibition FLOW of Change: Black voices for climate action (2022) was the largest climate-inspired water installation in Mexico City, marking the opening of the COP27 Conference in Egypt. Cultivating a cosmopolitan lifestyle, she lives between Paris and San Miguel de Allende but is proudly from Oakland, California.