Mx Ani Lacy

Ani Lacy is an American artist, curator, and art historian based in Bath, England. Her research focuses on ceramics in the Black Atlantic, with particular attention to colonoware and the material practices shaped by displacement, forced migration, and cross-cultural exchange. She combines archival study, fieldwork, and practice-based investigation to understand how wild clay, hand-building, and low firing illuminate forms of embodied knowledge maintained by enslaved and Indigenous makers in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

Her doctoral project develops the grammar of continuation, a framework for analysing how diasporic objects preserve memory, technical patterning, and cultural logic even when formal traditions have been interrupted. Through close study of historical vessels, contemporary visual culture, and her own experimental ceramic work, she examines how material and technical choices become carriers of continuity in changing environments.

Lacy’s broader research interests include African and Indigenous diasporic epistemologies, ecological approaches to material culture, and the role of practice within art historical interpretation. Alongside her academic work, she curates exhibitions that explore migration, ecological memory, and place-making, positioning ceramics as both a historical archive and a living mode of knowledge-making.