Who Is Nashormeh Lindo? Artist, Educator, and California’s First Black Arts Council Chair

On January 25, 2018, the California Arts Council voted unanimously to elect Nashormeh Lindo its twenty-first chair, making her the first African American woman to lead the agency in its nearly fifty-year history. The vote was a matter of public record, and no entertainment publication covered it.

Nashormeh Lindo is a Philadelphia-born mixed-media artist, arts educator, and former California Arts Council chair who has worked across American cultural institutions for more than five decades, from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has been married to the actor Delroy Lindo since 1990. Her name became widely searched in March 2026, after he received a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 98th Academy Awards for his portrayal of Delta Slim in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.

Growing Up in Philadelphia, in Classrooms That Had No Black Artists

Nashormeh Lindo was raised in Philadelphia, the daughter of an industrial papermaker who brought home scraps of paperboard from the mill for her to draw on. When paper ran out, she drew on the walls. Her father played Marian Anderson records in the house and held onto an autographed program from one of her performances. Neither parent had been to college, but both made sure the children spent time in libraries and museums.

Her mother introduced her to James Baldwin; a Black bookstore where she worked as a young woman brought her to Hurston, Angelou, and Hughes.

She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls, where she was the only Black girl in her art classes. At Pennsylvania State University, where she earned her B.A. in Art in 1976, she was again the only Black student in the art department. Her professors, including the supportive ones, had nothing to teach her about African American artists because they genuinely did not know them. She found what the curriculum withheld through the stacks at Penn State’s Pattee Library, on her own time.

A conference at Penn State organized by the painter Richard Mayhew gathered living Black artists in one place, the first time Lindo had encountered them outside of books. She made the trip on a one-way fare because a return ticket was not in the budget and missing it was not an option.

From Baltimore and the Schomburg to California

After Penn State, she taught art in Philadelphia’s public schools before a fellowship in arts management from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts took her to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she served as Coordinator of Community Services.

From Baltimore she moved to New York, where she became Manager of Educational Programs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library and one of the most significant archives of Black intellectual and creative life in the country. During her New York years she also held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. She completed her Master of Science in Museum Leadership at Bank Street College of Education in 1994.

In 2001, she and Delroy left New York for Oakland, where their son Damiri was born. She had no interest in more New York winters, and moving to Los Angeles was never part of the conversation. In California she taught African American Art History as an adjunct instructor at City College of San Francisco and worked as a lecturer and exhibition consultant for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, SFMOMA, and the Oakland Museum of California.

Seven Years on the California Arts Council

Governor Jerry Brown appointed Lindo to the California Arts Council in 2014. She was elected Vice Chair in April 2016, and on January 25, 2018, she became the agency’s twenty-first chair, the first African American woman to hold the position. She stepped down in January 2021.

The changes she helped push through during those seven years remain in effect:

• Fellowships for arts administrators of color, creating a formal path into the field where none had previously existed
• Paid honoraria for grant review panelists, ending the long-standing expectation that experts evaluate funding applications without compensation
• Racial equity written into Council policy as a structural commitment, not a stated aspiration

“One can be an artist and also engage in advocacy and policy, which is an art form in its own right. It doesn’t diminish your import and your ability to be creative and make art that is significant and impactful.”

Nashormeh Lindo, California Arts Council, 2021

The Art: Collage, Photography, and SkyScarves

Lindo started as a landscape painter, making small watercolors while working outdoors. She began photographing as a way to capture changing light conditions during sessions and found herself increasingly drawn to the camera. Using her mother’s Brownie first and later a Polaroid, she documented years of family portraits and gatherings, and noticed she was rarely in any of the images because she was always the one holding the camera. Her response was to cut herself back into the prints through collage, assembling her presence in a frame where she had been absent.

She works today as a mixed-media artist, combining painting, digital photography, and printmaking into collage and assemblage works on paper, canvas, wood, metal, and textiles. Her themes across the work are family memory, portraiture, cultural identity, and different standards of beauty. Her work is represented at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco.

Selected exhibitions:

Her NormaNamesake (2006) and Gem-in-Eye (2006), both Jacquard tapestries, are listed at Rena Bransten Gallery. She also produces SkyScarves, signed limited-edition wearable prints on modal/silk blend fabric, available at Chic in Oakland and Galerie Marie in Collingswood, New Jersey. In 2018 she contributed the essay “From the Middle Room to the Mountains: The Artist Within” to the anthology All the Women in My Family Sing, edited by Deborah Santana, where she addressed the same questions of identity and family memory in written form.

Delroy Lindo, Damiri, and Life in Oakland

Nashormeh and Delroy Lindo married in 1990. Damiri, their son, grew up in Oakland and attended Saint Mary’s College High School in Berkeley. He went on to play college basketball at Holy Names University in Oakland, then transferred to the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where he posted a career-high twenty-seven points in January 2024, and completed his senior year at Queens College in New York in 2024 to 2025.

Delroy spoke about the marriage during a February 2026 appearance on The Jennifer Hudson Show:

“When you have that kind of support, it’s easier to pick yourself up and face another day, face another situation. It’s important.”

Delroy Lindo, The Jennifer Hudson Show, February 2026

Sinners, the 2026 Oscars, and What Came After

Delroy Lindo received his first Academy Award nomination at seventy-three, for Best Supporting Actor at the 98th Academy Awards for his portrayal of the blues musician Delta Slim in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Damiri was the one who called to tell him. The family attended the ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on March 15, 2026.

Her name, which appears online in both spellings as Nashormeh and Neshormeh Lindo, surfaced in hundreds of results in the weeks that followed. Most described her as Delroy Lindo’s wife; very few reached the years she spent on the California Arts Council or the changes she made there.

In 2024 she enrolled in a doctoral program at Penn State studying art education and African American and Diasporan Studies. She still teaches art to children in Oakland and continues to make work.

She had been here since 1976.