About

Nicole Brydson is a conceptual artist, journalist and entrepreneur who was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from Harvard in 2004 with a BA in political science, and concentrations in film, art history and writing, Nicole went on to work in constituent services and communications for the New York State Senate and later the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2006, she left to write for the New York Observer, where she covered politics, New York City nightlife, fashion, entertainment and culture, also writing a weekly column called Brooklyn, the Borough.

Nicole founded Misfit Media in 2009, its first four years dedicated to building BrooklynTheBorough.com, where Nicole served as editor of the early local digital journalism project. The site ran daily content by nearly fifty volunteer citizen journalists about hyperlocal life in Brooklyn arts, politics, real estate and culture, as well as hosting and promoting local cultural events. Articles from the site have received mention on WNYC Radio, and have been referenced by a spectrum of blogs, the New York Times and Wikipedia. A collection of content from the site will soon be published as a digital book.

At South By Southwest in 2014, Misfit Media launched the network interchanges.io, a digital media publishing platform supporting creative people and independent media projects with open source website hosting and design. As a solo speaker chosen from 3300 applicants that year, Nicole presented a feminist critique of the media and technology industries as they have baked the structural prejudices of society into their burgeoning businesses.

Nicole has shown and performed art in a variety of mediums. She is the creator of the viral sticker meme project turned performance-pop-up-shop Because Capitalism. It began in 2014 as a satirical response to the company Supreme suing artists in court over use of the Futura font that brands their name. The image is both a tribute to the artist Barbara Kruger who pioneered the style, and an appropriation of the Supreme logo. Soon, stickers of the phrase were found to be appropriating and re-contextualizing public space in major cities across the U.S., and it has since been translated into fourteen languages. On demand merchandise satirizing the global economy is available at BecauseCapitalism.org as a means of supporting the project.

Nicole is also a co-creator and co-editor of the 2016 book Making History Bushwick, an independently published collection of over four hundred original pieces of art and firsthand stories from a decade of community and creative production in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for which she wrote the introduction.

Nicole and her husband Rhett Henckel are based out of New York City, often roaming the country working nomadically from their tiny house, Sur Topaz (she bad). 

“If the whole world fell apart, Nicole Brydson would still end up writing some kind of media with charred dog bones on chunks of asphalt. She’s got it in her, and it will always come out.” 

–Cintra Wilson