Who Is Nashormeh Lindo? Artist and Wife of Delroy Lindo

An artist and educator who became the first African American woman to chair the California Arts Council, with a career in American art reaching back to the 1970s and a long marriage to actor Delroy Lindo.

Nashormeh Lindo is an American artist and educator who led the California Arts Council, the agency that funds arts programs and sets cultural policy across the state. She chaired it from 2018 to 2021, the first African American woman to hold the role. She is married to the actor Delroy Lindo, whose part in Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners earned him his first Academy Award nomination in 2026.

Her own work in the arts started in the mid 1970s and runs through galleries, classrooms, museums and state policy. Much of it happened well away from any red carpet.

Nashormeh Lindo at a glance

Early life and education in Philadelphia

Lindo grew up in Philadelphia. Her father worked as an industrial papermaker and carried home offcuts of board from the mill, and those scraps became the first things she drew on. She drew the people around her, including the congregation at Mother Bethel AME Church.

She studied art at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, where she was the only Black student in her art classes. The same was true at Pennsylvania State University. Her instructors there asked why she painted so many Black subjects, and not one of them could name an African American artist for her to study. She went and found them herself, working through the campus library. She graduated with a degree in art in 1976.

A job at a Black bookstore filled the gap her classes had left. That is where she first read Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez and Maya Angelou.

A career across museums and classrooms

A fellowship in arts management from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts moved Lindo out of the classroom and into museum work. She became coordinator of community services at the Baltimore Museum of Art, then managed educational programs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library research center that holds one of the country’s deepest collections on Black history.

In California she taught African American art history as an adjunct at City College of San Francisco. She has also worked as a consultant and lecturer for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of California, writing and speaking on how African American history shapes art, music and writing. She continues to teach art to children in Oakland.

Leading the California Arts Council

Governor Jerry Brown appointed Lindo to the California Arts Council in 2014 and reappointed her in 2017. She served as vice chair from 2016, and on January 25, 2018, the other members elected her chair, the first African American woman to lead the council in its history. They re-elected her in December 2019, and her term ran out in January 2021. By the end she had given the council seven years, three of them as chair.

While she led it, the council changed parts of how California pays for the arts. It added grants aimed at individual artists, set up fellowships for arts administrators of color, started paying the panelists who review grant applications, and put equity at the center of its funding decisions.

She has never treated her art and her policy work as separate things. “One can be an artist and also engage in advocacy and policy,” she said in the council’s Dream magazine in 2021.

Her art and exhibitions

Lindo started out painting landscapes in small watercolors, working outdoors. She began carrying a camera to hold onto scenes she could not finish in one sitting, and photography turned into its own practice. Her work now combines painting, photography and printmaking into collages, which she also prints onto paper, wood, metal and fabric. Her subjects run to family, memory, travel and portraiture, and she often folds her own family photographs into the collages, partly because years behind the camera had left her out of the family album. She also makes a line of printed scarves she calls SkyScarves.

She has shown her work next to some of the better known names in Black American art. In the 2019 to 2020 exhibition To Reflect Us at the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, her pieces hung with those of Carrie Mae Weems, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Mildred Howard. In 2020 she took part in Migrations and Meaning(s) in Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, curated by the photographer and scholar Deborah Willis. In 2022 she returned to Penn State for an alumni exhibition called Full Circle.

Nashormeh Lindo and Delroy Lindo

Nashormeh and Delroy Lindo married in 1990. The London born actor is known for Malcolm X, Clockers, Da 5 Bloods and, most recently, Sinners, the role that brought him an Academy Award nomination. He trained as an actor in San Francisco, and the couple has long lived in the Bay Area.

They have one son, Damiri Lindo, born in 2001 and raised in Oakland. Nashormeh has stood beside her husband at film premieres and award shows going back to his work with Spike Lee in the 1990s, and the family went together to the NYU Tisch School of the Arts gala in 2023.

What she is doing now

Lindo is still working and showing in 2026. She is part of public programming at the Oakland Museum of California built around an exhibition by the artist Mildred Howard, whose work she has shown alongside before.

She has also gone back to school. Fifty years after she graduated from Penn State, where her art education left out every Black artist she later had to find on her own, she is a doctoral candidate there in African American and Diasporan studies.

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