Research
"Top 10 Looks When Fashion Meets Art" for Lively Magazine 2013; Image credit: Vivienne Westwood Spring 2010 // Marie Antoinette, A La Rose, Louise Elizabeth Vigee La Bron, 1783
"Interview with Fashion Designer Son Jung Wan" for Lively Magazine 2013; Image credit: Son Jung Wan Fall 2013 “Dynamic Romance” Collection at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week.
"The Material Biography and Sartorial Remembrance of my Abuelita Martha" for The Fashion and Race Database™ 2022; Image credit: San Francisco, California, the early-1990s. Abuelita Martha wearing a design she created for the Dress/ Model Competition at the 30th Senior Center.
BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice Issue 2 - Fashion + Politics 2014
BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice Issue 1 - Fashion + Healing 2013
Good Guy Versus Bad Guy: A Reflection of Fashionable Menswear Through The Big Sleep 2012 (Original title: Using Film as a Reflection of Current Fashions); Image credit: Humphrey Bogart as Detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946).
Unknown Garment: Vera Maxwell 2013; Image credit: Vera Maxwell Ensemble 1952 by Frances McLaughlin-Gill.
A Look into Alfred Hitchcock's Obsession: The Woman in the Tailored Suit 2012; Image credit: Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels in The Birds (1963).
"Exhibition Review: Levi Strauss: A History of American Style" for the Fashion Studies Journal 2020; Image credit: Found ephemera, 1900–09. These items were found in a Goldfield, Nevada mineshaft alongside a fragment of a Swedish newspaper, leading to the assumption that their owner may have been a Swedish immigrant. The cache of artifacts includes a pair of Levi’s® 501® jeans; a piece of a blue bandana; a gingham shirt fragment; a Prince Albert tobacco tin; a miner's hat dotted with wax; a page of a farm newspaper from July 15, 1904; a poke bag (a small cloth sack); and a bakery label of unknown origin.
"Exhibition Review: Levi Strauss: A History of American Style" for the Fashion Studies Journal 2020; Image credit: Installation view at The Contemporary Jewish Museum by Gary Sexton Photography.
“Go for Fantasy or Reflect Reality?”: A Playful Visual Liaison between the Clothed Body, Embodiment, and Film Characters for UN:RESOLVED 2021
“Go for Fantasy or Reflect Reality?”: A Playful Visual Liaison between the Clothed Body, Embodiment, and Film Characters 2021
"Interview with Museum of FIT Deputy Director and Curator of Ivy Style, Patricia Mears" for Lively Magazine 2012. Image credit: Ivy Style installation at the Museum of FIT.
Designing the Second Skin: Giorgio di Sant’Angelo 1971-1991 at Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center 2012
Designing the Second Skin: Giorgio di Sant’Angelo 1971-1991 at Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center 2012
Designing the Second Skin: Giorgio di Sant’Angelo 1971-1991 at Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center 2012
School of Fashion at Milk Gallery 2014
School of Fashion at Milk Gallery 2014
Making/Meaning: Parsons Festival Exhibition 2014 at Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
Making/Meaning: Parsons Festival Exhibition 2014 at Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
Shameless Self-Promotion: Senior Thesis Exhibition, Part 1 at UCR Sweeney Art Gallery and North Atrium Gallery at Culver Center of the Arts 2011
Joshua Tree Exhibition: UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center at the California Museum of Photography 2009
Photo Courtesy Ken Harris, Jamaica, NY circa 1975 for the Queens Memory Project.
Gala Opening Reception: UCR ARTSblock! at the California Museum of Photography and Sweeney Art Gallery 2011
"Interview with Vijay Ramanathan" for the Queens Memory Project 2023
"Interview with Giselle Sabine Agudelo" for the Archaeology of Fashion podcast 2025
GENDERLESS STREETWEAR: Fashioning Presentations of the Body through Hood By Air 2014 (MA Fashion Studies Thesis)
The School of Fashion 30 Parsons Designers by Simon Collins 2014
Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture by Heike Jenss 2017
Love Letters To & From Brooklyn 2020. A collection of photographs taken during the Summer of 2020 in Brooklyn.
"The Social Life of Fashion Objects" in Radical Fashion Exercises: A Workbook of Modes and Methods edited by Laura Gardner and Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran 2023
The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture, and Identity by Marcel Rosa-Salas and Isabel Attyah Flower 2023. An extension of the cultural project "Documenting the Nameplate."
Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear edited by G. James Daichendt 2024
The Village Voice: Street Style at NYFW 2015
The Lived Places Publishing Fashion & Style Collection seeks authors from academic and practitioner circles with a desire to publish scholarship and narratives that engage readers in fashion, style, and personal expressions of appearance. Lived Places Publishing is focused on producing course reading content that engages the student reader with stories at the intersection of social identity and place or context.
"The Clothes We Wear, The Clothes We Keep: How First-Generation Americans Use Styling as Storytelling” in the Journal of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture special issue, “Ad-Dressing Margins”: Historically Underrepresented Fashion and Style 2024
The University of Göttingen x St. John’s University, “What We Leave Behind: Legacies of Our Past,” 2024 museum brochure.
Fostering Fashion: A Virtual Tour of the ASU FIDM Museum. A live virtual event moderated by Nicole K. Rivas and led by Christina Johnson, Senior ASU FIDM Museum Curator, provides more insight into the museum's resources, collections, and the making of its most recent exhibit, "Fashion Statements."
"Artistas de la Diáspora Salvadoreña" (Artists of the Salvadorean Diaspora), 2024. A short documentary about the Salvadorean diaspora. Elliot Campos (pianist and composer) and Sarah Rosales (opera singer) pay homage to Los Vikings and their love for their immigrant parents.
"Genius: MLK/X" (2024). The docu-drama series offers an intimate look into the lives of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X's complex lives molded by strong fathers and traumatic injustices, and their rich, parallel stories as they shaped their identities and became the change they wished to see in the world. Wardrobe provided by Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing.
“Redefining, Reconstructing, and Reclaiming Family Histories Through the Ovando Family Archives” for The Metropolitan Archivist, Summer 2025 Issue
A live virtual event moderated by Nicole K. Rivas and led by Catherine Acosta, Product Archivist and Historian for the iconic Southern California footwear and action sports brand Vans, a VF Company. Discussions center on material culture, the blending of consumer products and art, and the breaking down of how Vans is bringing its history and heritage to modern-day marketing campaigns, product development, and more.
Nicole’s areas of expertise focus on examining articles of clothing to provide chronological, cultural, and creative contexts. Using material and visual culture, film and art history, and social anthropology with emotional memory through a fashion studies lens, she participates in the colloquies of sociocultural dress practices.
While undergoing archival research, collections management, editorial work, exhibition curation, fashion productions, and educational endeavors, she contributes to the study of fashion.
Exhibitions
The University of Göttingen x St. John’s University: Museum of Culture & Communication, “What We Leave Behind: Legacies of Our Past,” March- May 2024
Metaverse x Parsons School of Design, “UN:RESOLVED,” 2021
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, “Making/ Meaning: The 2014 Parsons Festival Exhibition,” April- May 2014
Milk Gallery, “The School of Fashion,” April 2014
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, “Designing The Second Skin: Giorgio di Sant’Angelo 1971- 1991,” December 2012
Sweeney Art Gallery, “FOREPLAY: Senior Exhibition 2012,” May- June 2012
California Museum of Photography and Sweeney Art Gallery, “Gala Opening Reception: UCR ARTSblock!,” February 2011
California Museum of Photography, “Joshua Tree Exhibition: UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center,” October- December 2009
Archaeology of Fashion: And The Discourse on Secondhand Objects, “Interview with Giselle Sabine Agudelo” (2025)
Queens Memory Project, “Interview with Vijay Ramanathan” (2023)
The Fashion and Race Database™, “Listen to the author's Tia Ceci describe Abuelita Martha's style“ (2022)
Oral History/ Discourse Projects
Archaeology of Fashion: And The Discourse on Secondhand Objects, “Interview with Giselle Sabine Agudelo” (forthcoming 2025)
Genius: MLK/X (Wardrobe Consultant) (2024)
Artistas de la Diáspora Salvadoreña [Artists of the Salvadorean Diaspora] (Research Consultant) (2024)
Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA): Academic Papers Collection, “Recollections from a Cultural Memory Worker in the Lesbian Herstory Archives” (2023)
Queens Memory Project, “Interview with Vijay Ramanathan” (2023)
The Fashion and Race Database™, “Listen to the author’s Tia Ceci describe Abuelita Martha's style” (2022)
Documenting the Nameplate (Contributing Narrator) (2020)
Publications
Cultivating Identities of Second-Generation Immigrants Through the Archaeology of Fashion: A Discourse on Secondhand Objects (Lived Places Publishing expected 2026)
The Metropolitan Archivist, “Redefining, Reconstructing, and Reclaiming Family Histories Through the Ovando Family Archive” (forthcoming 2025)
Journal of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture: “Ad-Dressing Margins”: Historically Underrepresented Fashion and Style, “The Clothes We Wear, The Clothes We Keep: How First-Generation Americans Use Styling as Storytelling” (Intellect Books 2024).
Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear (Intellect Books 2024). Peer-reviewer.
Radical Fashion Exercises: A Workbook of Modes and Methods, “The Social Life of Fashion Objects” (Valiz 2023).
The Fashion and Race Database™, “Our Fashion History: The Sartorial Remembrance and Material Biography of My Abuelita Martha” (2022).
Love Letters To & From Brooklyn (self-published 2020).
The School of Fashion: 30 Parsons Designers (Assouline 2014). Research Assistant.
Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture (Bloomsbury 2017). Research Assistant.
BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice
Issue 1: Fashion + Healing (2013)
Issue II: Fashion + Politics (2014)
Lively Magazine, “Interview with Patricia Mears, Deputy Director of Museum at FIT” (2012); “Interview with Son Jung Wan, Korean Fashion Designer” (2013).
Unpublished Research Papers
Exhibition Review: Levi Strauss: A History of American Style (2020)
Genderless Streetwear: Fashioning Presentations of the Body Using Hood By Air (2014)
Unknown Garment: Vera Maxwell (2013)
Good Guy Versus Bad Guy: A Reflection of Fashionable Menswear Through The Big Sleep (2012)
A Look into Alfred Hitchcock's Obsession: The Woman in the Tailored Suit (2012)