Sonia Boyce has dedicated her work to deconstructing representations of the Black body, and to debates surrounding the invisibility of Black artists within mainstream cultural history. Since the 1990s, Boyce’s practice has largely been entangled in performance, particularly musical and choreographic, along with other collaborations with artists, performers, and the public. Boyce’s artworks with performers and audiences-cum-collaborators, demonstrates how cultural differences can be celebrated through the play of mediation and spontaneity.

Through 2004–2005, Boyce was a NESTA Artist Fellow (the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts), where she developed her research in the social dynamics of collaboration in art. In 2007, Boyce received an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Selected for the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in Italy, Boyce presented Exquisite Cacophony (2015), a film of a performance by two vocalists, Astronautalis and Elaine Mitchener. Developed around acts of improvisation, the work explored the anxieties and slippages that result from these kinds of exchanges.