Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, in partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), is pleased to announce the second cohort of the G.A.S. Critical Writing Workshop. Following a successful pilot programme, held in March 2026, the workshop continues to support the professional and critical development of emerging art writers, researchers, and cultural practitioners in Nigeria.
The seven participants are: Azeezat Azeez Adeola, Chibuzo Emmanuel, Emmanuella Jossy, Emmanuella Nwachukwu, Ifeanyi Ogbo, Mustapha Enesi, and Timothy Bolarinwa. They were selected by Folasade Ologundudu, current G.A.S. resident and recipient of the G.A.S. Fellowship Award 2026, who will also facilitate the workshop. We are grateful to Folasade for her time and thoughtful consideration throughout the selection process.
Over three days at G.A.S. Lagos, participants will take part in workshops, readings, lectures, and discussions. They will study a Nigerian modernist artist alongside a contemporary artist, treating art history as a living, revisable record rather than a fixed one. The programme will ask how Nigerian and Black artists have been framed within a Eurocentric art-historical canon, and what it means to retell these histories through contemporary African voices. Sessions will draw on archival texts, roundtables, and screenings, alongside presentations on Black liberatory thinkers including Wole Soyinka, Manthia Diawara, Toni Morrison, Tina Campt, and James Baldwin. Through guided writing prompts and peer feedback, participants will develop a clear argument and point of view, and will finish with a draft article or essay to be considered for publication.
The G.A.S. Critical Writing Workshop falls under the wider scope of Project Nexus, an ambitious residency and education programme designed to nurture and empower artists, art educators, art historians, and curators through a series of residencies, professional development workshops, and educational initiatives over three years. The project embodies the spirit of collaboration and cultural exchange that lies at the heart of both Foundations’ missions, aiming to encourage and cultivate artistic excellence and curatorial innovation. Project Nexus is generously supported by Deutsche Bank.
About the Participants
Azeezat Azeez Adeola
Azeezat Azeez Adeola is a Lagos-based researcher, educator, and visual art writer. Her work examines material sovereignty, indigenous Yoruba craft practices, digital art, and contemporary pedagogical frameworks. She holds a B.A. (Hons) in Fine and Applied Art from Olabisi Onabanjo University and has served as a research assistant, educator, and independent writer in Lagos.
Chibuzo Emmanuel
Chibuzo Emmanuel is a Lagos-based writer and curator interested in interrogating the big disruptions facing young Africans—technocapitalism, the rising tide of homophobia in certain parts of the continent, artificial intelligence, the widening wealth gap between generations, and cultural displacement. He also takes a keen interest in black joy, black excellence, and shifting cultural threads within Africa and the black diaspora. His writing appears in publications such as Dazed Magazine, The Guardian, Deeds Magazine, Native Mag, and Culture Custodian. He works with the programme department at leading art foundation, Angels and Muse, where he helps curate programmes at the intersection of contemporary art and youth culture. He is currently working on a short story collection exploring the vagaries of existing as a young adult in these fraught times.
Emmanuella Jossy
Emmanuella Jossy is a writer and communications expert working across brand and cultural strategy by trade, and independent research and writing by practice. Her work, through ongoing projects, traces personhood outside institutional defaults, colonial and postcolonial history, the political memory of marginalised groups, and the systems and narratives that shape how people and societies make meaning. She holds a First Class Honours degree in Economics, and has spent six years in brand and communications working with organisations such as Access Bank, ALARA Lagos, and Learn Africa, among others. This work has grounded a parallel practice of close reading of Nigerian art and culture, where she reads artistic work as a carrier of historical memory and political argument. Her essays move between lived experience, theory, creative practice and history. Her current line of inquiry exists inside broader, standing questions about ideologies, why systems fail and how meaning is made and lost within them, and she is extending these questions into the study of African cultural and political history.
Emmanuella Nwachukwu
Emmanuella Nwachukwu is a Lagos-based writer, editor and critic who also works in film and photography. Her work spans critical writing, filmmaking and cultural work, with interests in African art, cinema and cultural memory. She is a graduate of the MultiChoice Talent Factory and has written film and performance criticism for the Lagos Fringe Young Critics/Reviewers Programme. She founded The Cinephile Movie Club, where she curates film screenings and facilitates conversations around them. She is currently writing a critical essay on SQ Productions’ Of the Red Soil for the PORT·HARBOUR anthology Rituals and Rebirth. Alongside her writing and film work, she is developing her interest in curatorial practice.
Photo: Emmanuel Silver.
Ifeanyi Ogbo
Ifeanyi Ogbo is a Lagos-based writer and the author of four books, spanning poetry and short fiction. His writing explores wonder, memory, spirituality and the beautiful strangeness of being alive. He is also a gardener, a long-walk enthusiast, and a collector of seashells, among other small obsessions.
Mustapha Enesi
Mustapha Enesi is an award-winning short story writer and essayist whose work explores memory, displacement, the tensions between tradition and modernity, and the quiet devastations of family life. His debut short story collection, I Cry at the Feet of My Other Body (Witsprouts, 2025), was recognised on Open Country Magazine’s 60 Notable Books of 2025. He is the managing editor of The Moveee Literary. He is Ebira, writes from Lagos, Nigeria, and is an incoming MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Mississippi.
Timothy Bolarinwa
Timothy Bolarinwa is a Lagos-based writer and cultural researcher interested in how African culture is documented, interpreted and valued. His work interrogates the relationship between cultural history, artistic agency and the systems through which cultural value is created and sustained. He is currently developing Atlas, a project focused on building greater economic value around African culture while protecting the ownership, provenance and meaning of the work and practices that produce it. His interests extend across art writing, contemporary African art, cultural history, intellectual property and the economics of culture.
Photo: Emmanuel Popoola.