Sonia Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning black British art-scene of that time with artworks that spoke about racial identity and gender in Britain.  Since the 1990s Boyce’s practice has taken a more multi-media and socially inclusive approach to bridge cultural differences.

Since 1983, she has exhibited extensively throughout the UK and internationally. Exhibitions and monographs include: Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues, (Gilane Tawadros, Kala Press 1997), Annotations 2/Sonia Boyce: Performance, (Mark Crinson, Iniva - the Institute of International Visual Arts 1998); Video Positive: the other side of zero, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool (2000); Recent Sonia Boyce: la, la, la, Reed College, Portland – Oregon (2001); Century City: art and culture in the modern metropolis, Tate Modern, London (2001); Sharjah International Bienal 7, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2005); Devotional, National Portrait Gallery, London (2007); Crop Over, Harewood House, Leeds and Barbados Museum & Historical Society (2007/2008), For you, only you (Paul Bonaventura, Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford University and tour 2007/2008), Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty, Thessaloniki Biennal 2, Greece (2009); Like Love, Spike Island, Bristol and tour (publication by the Green Box Press, Berlin, 2010); and Afro Modern, Tate Liverpool and tour, 2010.

In 2007, David A Bailey, Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce jointly received the History of British Art Book Prize (USA) for the edited volume Shades of Black: Black Art in 1980s Britain, published by Duke University Press in collaboration with Iniva and AAVAA – the African and Asian Visual Artists Archive. In the same year she was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, for her services to art. Boyce is currently an AHRC Research Fellow at Wimbledon College of Art and Design: Centre for Drawing, University of the Arts London, and Associate Professor at Middlesex University, Department of Fine Art.