Althea McNish CM FSCD (15 May 1924 – 16 April 2020) was an artist from Trinidad who became the first Black British textile designer to earn an international reputation.

[13][14][15] She painted as a child, helped with her mother's dressmaking business by doing sketches, was a junior member of the Trinidad Arts Society and had her first exhibition at the age of 16.

[13][16] Her influences included local artists Sybil Atteck, Amy Leong Pang and Boscoe Holder, and European modernists such as Vincent van Gogh.

[22][23] More recently, her work — represented by three printed textiles from early in her career: Golden Harvest, Pomegranate and Fresco[24] — was featured in the exhibition RCA Black: Past, Present & Future (31 August–6 September 2011),[25] organised by the Royal College of Art in collaboration with the African and African-Caribbean Design Diaspora (AACDD) to celebrate art and design by African and African-Caribbean graduates.

[33][34] Also in 1959, for a commission by the Design Research Unit for the new SS Oriana, which was launched in November 1959 and was the last of the Orient Steam Navigation Company's ocean liners, she produced murals for two restaurants, Rayflower[35] and Pineapples and pomegranates,[36][37] laminated into Warerite plastic panels, a line later pursued by Perstorp Group.

[39] In 2018 McNish was named in Architectural Digest as one of "Five Female Designers Who Changed History" (alongside Maija Isola, Norma Merrick Sklarek, Muriel Cooper, and Denise Scott Brown).

[41][42] In 2022, a major retrospective of her work, entitled Althea McNish: Colour is Mine, was mounted (2 April–11 September 2022) at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London, sponsored by Liberty Fabrics.

[47] On 15 May 2023, coinciding with the 99th anniversary of her birth, a blue plaque was unveiled in her honour at her former home on West Green Road in Tottenham, north London.