Re:assemblages Symposium

Belinda Holden

Belinda Holden is the founding CEO of the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F. UK) and Guest Artists Space Foundation (G.A.S. Nigeria), leading internationally recognised arts initiatives that champion cultural exchange, interdisciplinary residencies, and building inclusive creative infrastructure.

She has grown and guided Y.S.F. and G.A.S. from concept to a dynamic, internationally recognised cultural institution that champions global cultural exchange, interdisciplinary residencies, community engagement and building inclusive creative infrastructure from the ground up. Launching in 2022 two interdisciplinary residential research spaces in Lagos and on the farm nr Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria. The foundation annually hosts 35+ multidisciplinary residents, including artists, curators, academics, farmers, and ecologists.

With over 20 years experience, Belinda has delivered major arts and culture initiatives across the UK, Nigeria, and Australia. She co-founded the consultancy T Projects in Melbourne, served as the formative strategic consultant to the Melbourne Metro Tunnel Creative Programme, and held senior roles at Futurecity in London and Sydney, working with developers, governments, cultural institutions and artists, to deliver and commission impactful, cultural strategies, significant artworks and community-driven cultural programmes within placemaking and the built environment.

Dr Oluwatoyin Zainab Sogbesan

Dr Oluwatoyin Zainab Sogbesan is an architect, cultural historian, and heritage specialist. She is the founder of Àsà Heritage Africa Foundation and has served as a curator, consultant, and lecturer across Nigeria, the US, and Europe. Her work focuses on heritage preservation, inclusive interpretation of culture, and intangible heritage in African contexts. She holds a PhD from City University London and numerous international fellowships.

Oyindamola Faithful

Oyindamola Faithful is the Executive & Artistic Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA, Lagos) and Àsìkò Art School, a roving Pan-African, place-based residency.

Oyindamola serves as the Board President for Res Artis, the worldwide professional body for artists' residencies and is the Associate Executive Director for the Global Arts in MedicineFellowship, a virtual training program for art and healthcare practitioners. Oyindamola’s practice often centers collaboration, access, inclusion, embodied experiences and new media technology.

Alongside Jude Anogwih and Emeka Ogboh she co-founded the Video Art Network Lagos (2009) and with Anogwih co-curated "Identity: An Imagined State" (2009) the first video art exhibition in Nigeria.She has worked on several biennial’s, including co-curating the Lagos Biennial II (2019), "How to Build a Lagoon With Just a Bottle of Wine," “Passengers in Transit” as part of the 60th edition of La Biennale de Venezia collateral projects (2024) and the 14th edition of the Recontres de Bamako “Kuma: La Parole” (2024). Oyindamola is a global voice contributing to conversations around cultural diplomacy, creative health, curators and artistic education.

Serubiri Moses

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator, editor, and author based in New York City. His writing is primarily concerned with theories of African art and exhibition histories, and his exhibitions are rooted in methods of collective teaching and listening as an epistemic practice. He serves as part-time faculty in Art History at Hunter College, CUNY, and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held teaching positions at New York University and the New Centre for Research and Practice, Germany/United States; Dark Study, United States; Digital Earth Fellowship, Netherlands; and delivered lectures at Williams College, Massachusetts; Yale University, Connecticut; University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The New School and basis voor aktuelle kunst, Netherlands; College of the Atlantic, Maine; and University of the Arts Helsinki. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2021); the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY (2019); and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018). He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and is an alumnus of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He is Contributing Editor at e-flux journal, and his forthcoming book Judith Namala: A Novella is published by CARA.

Miatta Kawinzi

Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, researcher, writer, and educator. Her practice explores cultural hybridity, personal and collective memory, home, belonging, and the poetics of freedom dreaming across African/Diasporic imaginaries, geographies, and temporalities. Of Liberian and Kenyan heritage, she is based in New York. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College. 

Her work has been presented at Smack Mellon, Knoxville Museum of Art, the Africa Center, Des Moines Art Center, PS122 Gallery, Pan African Film Festival with LACMA, ICA LA, CUE Art Foundation, New Orleans Film Festival, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.  

She is the recipient of the 2024 Creative Capital Award, 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work, and 2021-23 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Select residencies include Àsìkò Art School (CCA, Lagos & ARD; Cairo), Smack Mellon (NY), MacDowell (NH), Cité internationale des arts (Paris), and the Bag Factory (Johannesburg).

Najha Zigbi-Johnson

Najha Zigbi-Johnson is a writer, educator, and cultural organizer. Her Harlem-based practice explores the intersections of contemporary Black art, the built environment, and social movements. She is the editor of Mapping Malcolm, a transdisciplinary publication that engages the legacy of Malcolm X in the built environment. Najha’s work has been published by New York Magazine, Artforum, SEEN Journal, Essence, White Cube Gallery and more. Najha was raised in and currently resides in Harlem. Najha is a graduate of Guilford College and Harvard Divinity School, and was subsequently a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture Preservation and Planning at Columbia University.

Tumelo Mosaka

Tumelo Mosaka is a Johannesburg-born and New York-based independent curator.  He has worked within and outside museums exploring global transnational artistic practices, especially from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. He has curated numerous exhibitions including Between Distance and Desire: African Diasporic Perspectives (2024), Soloviev Foundation Gallery, NYC, Fragmented World / Coherent Lives, (2023) Opa-locka, FL; YAKHAL’ INKOMO, (2022-23) Javett-UP Art Center, University of Pretoria, South Africa; Usha Seejarim, (2020), Kunstinstituut Melly (Formerly known as Witte de With), Rotterdam; Turning Tide, (2017), Mémorial ACTe Museum, Guadeloupe, and Poetics Relation, (2015), Perez Art Museum, FL among many projects. Previous positions include Chief Curator for Investec Cape Town Art Fair, South Africa, curator at the Krannert Art Museum (KAM), Urbana-Champaign, Illinois and Associate Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, NY where he curated the landmark exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art (2007). Mosaka is currently the Mellon Arts Project Director with the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University.

sadé powell

sadé powell is a concrete poet from New York City, exploring performative writing through experimental print and paper techniques. inspired by her upbringing, she uses the sonic, kinesthetic, and linguistic elements of her 1930s royal typewriter to deploy dissemblance as black feminist poethics. she is a 2025 Jerome Fellow in Literature and holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School for the Arts. she is the author of periodluv(Belladonna* Collaborative), and her chapbook wordtomydead (Ugly Duckling Presse) received the 2025 Anna Rabinowitz Award. her debut poetry collection dontbeabitterbtch is out now with Selva Oscura Press. 

Pujan Karambeigi

Pujan Karambeigi is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University and the 2024–25 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). His research focuses on institutional histories of art, with particular attention to how art became a tool for nation-building in the context of postwar decolonization. He is the editor of downtowncritic.net, a former contributing editor at Jacobin, and his writing has appeared in Art in America, Texte zur Kunst, ARTMargins, Mousse Magazine, Artforum, and other publications. He has curated exhibitions at ISLAA New York, the Wallach Art Gallery, and Felix Gaudlitz.

Kemi Ilesanmi

Kemi Ilesanmi is an arts strategist, institution builder, and diaspora weaver. As Founder and Principal of KGI Projects, she cultivates and supports Black and Brown arts leaders, institutions, and ecosystems in the United States and African diaspora. For over 25 years, she has served as nonprofit executive, foundation officer, museum curator, and now consultant, advisor, and connector. As founding executive director of The Laundromat Project, she grew a fledgling community arts initiative into an internationally-recognized institution, increasing its impact and budget tenfold. Prior to that, Kemi held key roles at Creative Capital and the Walker Art Center. Along with recognition from the New York Times, The Art World podcast, and Metropolitan Museum, she serves on several boards and advisory councils. A graduate of Smith College, NYU, and Coro Leadership NY, her life journey is deeply informed by her Nigerian and Black American roots.

Temitayo Ogunbiyi

Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s practice explores the relationship between the environment, line, and representation. Moving between drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, her work responds to and forges dialogues between global current events, anthropological histories, and botanical cultures. Systems that capture, mediate, and direct the movement of people and matter are a recurring subject of investigation in her practice.  

In 2018, she built her first functional playground, appropriating construction materials and conventional household items into a composition of non-prescriptive stimuli, and has made seventeen playgrounds to date. Her most recent playground was on view at the Noguchi Museum (New York, USA).

Ogunbiyi’s other upcoming and recent exhibitions include projects at ART X Lagos, Arts Club of Chicago,  Kunstverein Hannover (Hannover, Germany), 3rd Harewood Biennial, Middelheimeum Museum (Antwerp, Belgium), De Singel (Antwerp, Germany), Bundeskunthalle (Bonn, Germany), Museum Tinguely (Basel, Switzerland), the 4th Lagos Biennale and  Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. She lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria, with her young family.

Naima Hassan

Naima Hassan is a researcher, curator, and archivist based in Berlin. She is Associate Curator and Archivist at Guest Artists Space Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation, where she leads Re:assemblages, a multi-year programme fostering collaboration and experimentation within African and Afro-diasporic art libraries and archives. In 2022, she founded the critical archives platform SITAAD. 

Hassan serves on the Steering Board of TheMuseumsLab and is a member of the New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures Working Group (2024–25). She has held fellowships including the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Fellowship at the University of Minnesota, and her work has been presented at Tate, Afterall, Africa Centre NYC, Recovery Plan Florence, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), University of Oxford, Internationales Theaterinstitut, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Käte Hamburger Research Centre, University of Munich, and Soomaal House of Art.

Maryam Kazeem

Maryam Kazeem is a writer and independent researcher. Her practice makes connections between archival research and the multidimensional nature of language. Through iranti press, a publishing experiment based in Lagos, Nigeria, which she founded in 2021, she explores publishing as social practice. She completed her MFA residency at the California Institute of the Arts as a Truman Capote Fellow where she also taught courses in Black cultural and performance studies as a Teaching Fellow for the School of Critical Studies. She has received awards and fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Prince Claus Fund, Processing Foundation, and Goethe Institut amongst others.

E.N. Mirembe

Mirembe is a cultural worker who works as a curator, writer and researcher. They are currently based at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt. Their curatorial practice is founded on an interest in work by Black writers and artists as an experimental ground for conversation, critical fabulation, play, theory, and method.

They curated exhibitions including; Forms of Fray (The African Arts Trust, 2025), The Geography of Fixed Things (ARAK Collection, 2025), Njabala: An Elegy (Makerere Art Gallery, 2024), at the limit of dream (Brussels, 2023). Together with Rosie Olang' Odhiambo they have co-curated in transit under another sky, an exhibition that has had iterations in Kampala, Nairobi, London, and at the 2025 Coventry Biennial.

Mirembe's writing is published in Artforum, Africa is a Country, African Arguments, and others.

Dr Nadine Siegert

Dr Nadine Siegert is a curator, researcher and editor with a focus on modern and contemporary arts and discourse of the Global South.  She has been the Director of the Goethe-Institut Nigeria since 2021. She had previously worked at the Goethe-Institut South Africa and was the Deputy Director of Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth. 

In 2016, she published her PhD “(Re)mapping Luanda on nostalgic and utopian aesthetic strategies in contemporary art in Angola”. Since 2009, she curated several solo and group exhibitions and ran the project “Mashup the Archive” together with Sam Hopkins. Siegert was a Brooks International Fellow at Tate Modern / Delfina Foundation, Writer in Residence with the NRF/DST SARChI research programme in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, Rhodes University and Curator in Residence at Vila Sul, Goethe-Institute Salvador de Bahia. 

Together with Katharina Fink she runs iwalewabooks and also opened bookshop and artist print studio with 16/16 in Lagos.

Mistura Allison

Mistura Allison is a researcher, curator and art historian. She is the founder of ashikọ, a visually driven research platform inspired by Africa and its Diaspora. Currently, she serves as Curator and Project Coordinator at Villa Romana in Florence, engaging in transnational artistic practices with a focus in contemporary art and advancing methodologies of decentralised exhibition-making. Her work focuses on research-based practices engaging with the plurality of contemporary Diasporic visual and oral productions. She is part of the curatorial collective at Archive Ensemble, where she co-curates the programme Publishing Practices. 

Olukemi Lijadu

Olukemi Lijadu is a Nigerian-British artist working in moving image and sound. Trained in philosophy at Stanford, she explores music as a living archive of Black Atlantic memory and connection. Her practice fuses filmmaking and DJ-ing, performing live scores for works like Guardian Angel (ICA London, 2022). She composed for Alvaro Barrington’s GRACE at Tate Britain (2024) and was a 2024 Villa Albertine resident and 2025 Magnet resident in New York. Exhibitions and screenings include Tate Britain, Royal Academy, Frieze Cork Street, The Kitchen, and Metrograph. Her first institutional solo show opens at Spike Island, Bristol, with Haus der Kunst.

Ufuoma Ogbemudje

Ufuoma Ogbemudje is a Nigerian Video Artist and Curator based in Lagos Nigeria. His video art practice is focused on experimentation through limited spaces and technology as well as rhythm and movement across time and cultures. His curatorial practice has been centred on projects concerning Black and African art history, conservation, and heritage.

He holds a B.A. in Film and Video with a minor in Art History from the University Of Toledo and has worked on exhibitions and films with the The Souls Grown Deep Foundation, The Toledo Museum of Art, Guest Artists Space Foundation, ArtX,The Centre for Contemporary Art, and SMO Contemporary Art.

Robyn Simpson

Robyn Simpson is a senior at Spelman College, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in art history. Committed to uplifting Black stories in art as an emerging professional, Robyn has interned at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Guest Artist Space Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During her internships, she worked in areas such as education, archival research, and curation. Her research focuses on the Black women artists of the FESTAC’77 U.S. Delegation and their archival reverberations of the festival, and recently completed her undergraduate senior thesis, Festac’77 and the Legacies of Black Women Artists.

Achille Tenkiang

Achille Tenkiang (b. 1995, Cameroon) is a cultural producer, writer, and strategist working at the intersection of storytelling, memory, and Black diasporic life. His interdisciplinary practice spans photography, criticism, poetry, and philanthropy, exploring how archives hold both rupture and repair. His current project, Black Mania(s), is a photographic and theoretical inquiry into Black neurodivergence, speculative annotation, and the psychic cost of liberation. He is the founder of the Baldwin Institute, a nonprofit rooted in James Baldwin’s legacy and dedicated to nurturing creative futures for Black and Brown artists, thinkers, and organizers. His work has appeared in Vogue, Rolling Stone, and BBC Culture, and has been shared at the Schomburg Center and the U.S. Embassy in France. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he moves across disciplines and diasporas—writing toward memory and curating cultural spaces grounded in kinship, care, and imagination.

Josie Roland Hodson

Josie Roland Hodson is a writer and PhD candidate in African American Studies and History of Art at Yale University. Her work considers evolutions in experimental Black aesthetics—new avenues in performance art, public installation, and collective practice—in New York City during periods of austerity. She is also a critic; her scholarly writing and criticism have appeared in October, Art in America, Grove Dictionary of Art, and Texte Zur Kunst.

Ore Disu

Ore Disu has served as the inaugural Director of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) Institute, Nigeria, since January 2022. She also sits on MOWAA’s Board and advises several institutions on social responsibility practices. Under her leadership, the Institute advances MOWAA’s mission to reframe cultural value by foregrounding precolonial African perspectives, geographic frameworks, and contextually-relevant practices of care.

Before joining MOWAA, she was the founding Executive Director of the Nsibidi Institute, a Lagos-based cultural think-tank, and worked extensively as a development practitioner. With over a decade of experience in cultural programming, research, and stakeholder engagement, she is a strong advocate for people-centred design, new publics, and talent development across Africa.

Ore holds degrees in Architecture (University of Cambridge) and Urban Studies (University College London). She is an alumna of the Yale Directors Forum Africa Fellowship (2022–2024).

Dr. Oluwatoyin Zainab Sogbesan

Dr. Oluwatoyin Zainab Sogbesan is an architect, cultural historian, and heritage specialist. She is the founder of Àsà Heritage Africa Foundation and has served as a curator, consultant, and lecturer across Nigeria, the US, and Europe. Her work focuses on heritage preservation, inclusive interpretation of culture, and intangible heritage in African contexts. She holds a PhD from City University London and numerous international fellowships.

Samba Yonga

Samba Yonga is an award-winning journalist, cultural curator, and transnational communications expert based in Lusaka, Zambia. Her interdisciplinary practice spans decolonial research, cultural heritage preservation, strategic communication, and feminist historiography. She is the co-founder of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia (WHMZ) and founder of Ku-Atenga Media, a firm specialising in communications design for African contexts. 

Her work interrogates knowledge asymmetries inherited from the colonial archive and activates museum collections, oral histories, and community knowledge to foreground African epistemologies—particularly those shaped by women and source communities. Her curatorial and research-led projects aim to reshape narratives, reframe institutional practice, and advance more equitable forms of global cultural cooperation.

Amanda M. Maples

Amanda M. Maples is Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She has taught university courses in African arts and served in curatorial and scholarly capacities at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, the High Desert Museum, and UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Maples has served as the Dialogues editor for the journal African Arts since 2020, and has curated a range of exhibitions on historical and contemporary African arts. Her scholarship explores urban and contemporary masquerade, decoloniality, jewelry and self-fashioning, museum policies, collecting practices, and restitutions. Maples holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Sylvia Arthur

Sylvia Arthur is a storyteller, National Geographic Explorer, and creator of A Women’s Oral History of West Africa, a project that documents the lives of West African women over 60 and presents an alternative postcolonial history of the region from the perspective of its women through the creation of an extensive oral archive. She is the founder of the Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD), a library, archive, writing residency, and research institute in Accra, Ghana, dedicated to the work of African and Diaspora writers from the late 19th century to the present day. She is a 2024 Ford Global Fellow and the 2023 Brittle Paper Literary Person of the Year.

Michelle Jacques

Michelle Jacques is a curator whose work bridges art history and contemporary practice through critical engagements with race, feminism, and modernism. Currently the Director of Exhibitions & Collections/Chief Curator at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, she has previously held curatorial positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1995–2002; 2004–12), served as Director of Programming at the Centre for Art Tapes in Halifax (2002–04), and was Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2012–21). 

Her recent projects include Dawit L. Petros: At the Edge of the Horizon I (Remai Modern, 2025); Land.Sea.Sugar.Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Contemplations of the Caribbean (co-curated with Sally Frater, Remai Modern, 2025); and Denyse Thomasos: just beyond (co-curated with Renée van der Avoird and Sally Frater, AGO/Remai Modern, 2022–23, traveling). Recent recognition includes a Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence (2022) and a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2024).

Joey Aresoa

Joey Aresoa is a multidisciplinary artist based in Madagascar whose work explores the power of personal and collective narratives. She investigates the persistence and erasure of stories that shape our identities, with a particular focus on memory and oral transmission.

Her creative approach is rooted in reactivating myths and legends, crafting everyday heroines to strengthen their representation in response to dominant narratives. Joey’s practice spans visual arts, poetry, and performance, often creating immersive and sensory installations that invite audiences to engage deeply with the themes of identity and history.

In her figurative work, she addresses iconographies inherited from colonization, creating a dialogue between past and present while questioning the meanings imposed by colonial history. This approach underscores the importance of revisiting and reinventing visual narratives as a way to reclaim and reimagine our image.

Azu Nwagbogu

Azu Nwagbogu is an internationally acclaimed curator, interested in evolving new models of engagement with questions of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation. In his practice, the exhibition becomes an experimental site for reflection, civic engagement, ecology and repatriation – both tangible and symbolic. Nwagbogu is the Founder and Director of African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non- profit organisation based in Lagos, Nigeria. He also serves as Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival, an annual international arts festival of photography held in Lagos. He is the publisher of Art Base Africa, a virtual space to discover and learn about contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas. In 2021, Nwagbogu was awarded “Curator of Year 2021” by the Royal Photographic Society, UK, and also listed amongst the hundred most influential people in the art world by ArtReview. In 2021, Nwagbogu launched the project “Dig Where You Stand (DWYS) - From Coast to Coast” which offers a new model for institutional building and engagement, with questions of decolonization, restitution and repatriation, the exhibition took place in Ibrahim’s Mahama’s culture hub SCCA in Tamale, Ghana. Most recently in 2023, Nwagbogu was appointed “Explorer at Large” by National Geographic Society to serve as an ambassador for the Organization and receive support to continue his storytelling work across Africa and globally, a title bestowed on a select few global change makers. Nwagbogu’s primary interest is in reinventing the idea of the museum and its role as a civic space for engagement for society at large.

Dr Jago Cooper

Dr Jago Cooper is Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and Professor of Art and Archaeology at UEA. For more than twenty years Jago has worked for and with museums, cultural ministries, technology companies, and heritage organizations around the world to explore and communicate aspects of the great human story. His research has ranged broadly across universal questions facing global society including climate change, technological revolution, colonial encounters and social innovation. In addition to his academic publications and papers, Jago has always worked hard to engage a broader public audience with his research interests creating exhibitions, digital platforms and broadcast media including writing and presenting more than a dozen documentaries for the BBC. 

After a decade working for the British Museum as the Head of the Americas, Jago joined the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at UEA in 2021.

Hon. Aisha Adamu Augie

Hon. Aisha Adamu Augie is a celebrated Creative Artist & Communications Strategist who currently serves as the Director-General of the Centre for Black and African Arts & Civilisation (CBAAC), a Pan-African agency domiciled at the Ministry of Arts, Culture & Creative Economy. The agency focuses on the values set by FESTAC77 to promote unity, peace and progress by preserving, propagating and promoting African Arts, History and Civilization.  

Augie is multifaceted, with relevant experience as an entrepreneur and worked in multiple industries within the private sector before delving into public service. She is a bridge builder between these sectors, engaging in Policy Advisory and development initiatives to support youth & women empowerment across Africa. 

Prior to her appointment, she served as Special Adviser to the Nigerian Minister of Finance, Budget & National Planning on Digital Communications Strategy. She was also Senior Special Assistant on New Media to the Governor of Kebbi State, where she coordinated state/nationwide publicity and reputation management. 

Augie is also the founder of The Centre For Art & Creative Talent (C-FACT), a non-profit organization working to bridge the gaps at the intersection of Talent, Financing & Intellectual Property Law in Nigeria since 2012.

Amal Alhaag

Amal Alhaag is an Amsterdam-based curator, researcher and co-initiator/facilitator of several initiatives, including Metro54, a platform for experimental sonic, dialogic and visual culture and the Side Room (2013-2016), a room for eccentric practices and people together with dear friend and artist Maria Guggenbichler. She develops ongoing experimental and collaborative research practice, public programs and projects on global spatial politics, archives, colonialism, counterculture, oral histories and popular culture. Her projects and collaborations with people, collectives, initiatives and institutions invite, stage, question and play with ‘uncomfortable’ issues that riddle, rewrite, remix, share and compose narratives in impermanent settings. Amal is currently part of the curatorial team of the quadrennial sonsbeek20→24 in Arnhem, Netherlands; senior research & public programmer at the Research Center for Material Culture, Netherlands and curatorial and research fellow at Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.

Quinsy Gario

Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten interested in decolonial remembering and instituting otherwise. His work Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012) ushered in the second anti-racism wave in the Netherlands. Through successive collaborative works in the Baltics from 2020 until 2024 he has contributed to conversations in the region on its role in the pan-European colonial project. He has an academic background in media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies and is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program at the Royal Academy of Art the Hague. He received the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, the Dutch Caribbean Pearls Community Pearl Award 2014, the Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe 12 Theater makers Prize 2011. From 2012 until 2018 he was a recurring participant of the Black Europe Body Politics conference series. In 2017 he received a Humanity in Action Detroit Fellowship and in 2017/2018 he was a BAK Fellow.

Gario is a member of Family Connection which was co-founded by his mother Glenda Martinus. In 2021 the collective’s work was collected for the Dutch National Art Collection. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam researching Dutch Afro-Caribbean art, museum collections and refusal.

Selene Wendt

Selene Wendt is an independent curator, writer and researcher whose ongoing curatorial focus is on decoloniality and socially engaged art practices, with emphasis on interdisciplinary projects situated at the intersection between contemporary art, music, and literature. She has curated exhibitions throughout the world and works regularly with prominent art institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niteroí, Brazil; The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, and El Museo de Arte del Banco de la Républica, Bogota, Colombia, and the Havana Biennial, among others. She writes regularly for art publications and journals such as NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press) and has written and edited numerous books and exhibition catalogues. Her book Beyond the Door of No Return, featuring contemporary artists whose works convey narratives of resistance against colonial rule, was co-published in 2021 by The Africa Institute and Skira. In 2022 she was appointed curator for Vanderbilt University's Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice two-year program Artistic Activism and the Power of Collective Resistance (2022-2023). For more detailed information about her work please see the website: https://theglobalartproject.no

Kanyin Ajayi

Kanyin Ajayi is a theatre practitioner, writer, and scholar with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and a B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. She leads the Organic Theatre Workshop in collaboration with 16/16 and recently translated, directed, and produced Marie NDiaye’s Rien d’humain for the stage in Lagos. She has also directed playlets and practised in theatre workshops at UCLA, the École normale supérieure and the Lavoir Moderne Parisien. She is a fiction assistant at The Drift and has published short fiction in Angel Food. Her scholarship is on postdramatic modes and critiques of representation and cultural authenticity in contemporary Francophone African theatre.

Kayode Adegbola

Kayode Adegbola is a Lagos-based lawyer and cultural entrepreneur. He is the founder of Adegbola Art Projects, a curatorial and advisory platform focused on Nigerian and African art across modern, contemporary, and traditional practices. His forthcoming Adegbola Gallery, opening in October 2025 with Heroes Past, will present an exhibition re-examining Nigerian independence through art and cultural history.  

Through initiatives ranging from large-scale corporate commissions and public art installations to collector-focused programmes, Adegbola is committed to strengthening the infrastructure of Nigeria’s art ecosystem.   

His practice foregrounds the role of collectors and cultural institutions in shaping access, scholarship, and visibility for Nigerian and African art within global discourse. 

Osahon Okunbo

Osahon Okunbo is an entrepreneur, investor, and cultural patron with interests in infrastructure, technology, and the creative economy. He is the founder of Vetrinox Capital, an investment firm that supports projects across these sectors. He also established Live! Lounge, Lagos’ first dedicated comedy and live performance club, and serves as Chairman of The Wells Carlton Hotel & Apartments in Abuja, a hospitality business known for its blend of comfort and ambition. 

Osahon’s focus extends beyond business leadership to creating platforms that support growth and opportunity. Through The Osahon Okunbo Foundation (TOOF), he provides mentorship, funding, and resources for emerging artists, designers, and cultural practitioners. The foundation has supported art fairs, training programs, and collaborations aimed at strengthening Africa’s creative industries. 

His career reflects a consistent interest in building sustainable ventures while advancing cultural development, combining strategic investment with initiatives that expand access and create long-term value.

Jamilah Malika Abu-Bakare

Jamilah Malika Abu-Bakare is an artist, writer and educator focused on creative practices that move us all towards freedom. Her research blends Black Feminism, Sound Studies and Media Literacy. She produces works that tend towards listening (as opposed to looking) and reading (instead of watching.)  Her art has exhibited from Sweden to Los Angeles and across Canada including Artspeak Gallery (Vancouver,) Artscape (Peterborough,) and Circuit Gallery (Toronto.) 

Her writing has appeared in LampBlack Lit, Canadian Art, CBC Arts and is forthcoming in Studio Magazine as well as an anthology with the  University of Regina Press entitled The Arts of Black Activism. She recently taught with the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University and has given lectures at York University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. abu-bakare is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who will soon be based in Morocco. 

Dr Jareh Das

Dr Jareh Das is an independent curator working between the UK and West Africa. Her work explores the intersections of modern and contemporary art, as well as performance.  

Das holds a PhD in Curating Art and Science: New Methods and Sites of Production from Royal Holloway, University of London, where her research explored live art practices within the context of visual arts. Her curatorial and writing practices privilege embodied knowledge and move fluidly across exhibitions, performance, and critical texts. Between 2020 and 2024, she developed and led curatorial research projects with institutions across Europe and West Africa, including Camden Art Centre, Deptford X Festival, and Galerie Atiss Dakar. Her writing spans exhibition catalogues, academic journals, magazines, and artist monographs, engaging closely with the practices of living and overlooked artists, as well as experimental forms of criticism. 
 

Das is currently working on her first book on Black women ceramicists and artists who work with clay.

Olufemi Akinsanya

Olufemi Akinsanya is an accomplished investment banker, chartered accountant, and art collector with over four decades of experience in Nigeria’s financial sector. He began his career at Arthur Andersen & Co. before joining First City Merchant Bank, where he rose to become General Manager and Head of Corporate Finance. In 1993, he founded Hamilton Hammer & Co. Ltd., a boutique investment banking firm, and United Securities Ltd., both of which he successfully divested in 2008. A pioneer in Nigeria’s capital market development, he played key roles in the demutualisation of the Nigerian Stock Exchange and the establishment of the NASD OTC market. Mr. Akinsanya currently chairs NGX Regulation Ltd and serves as Trustee to several cultural and educational institutions, including MUSON and the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History. He is also a passionate supporter of the arts and collector of African art.

Ann Marie Peña

Ann Marie Peña is a curator, cultural producer and policy advisor with a particular focus on social justice and community engaged artistic practices. She was Chair of the Curatorial Programme and a Founding Trustee of the Yinka Shonibare Foundation, and is currently Curator of Special Projects (at large) for the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Formerly Director of Frith Street Gallery, London, and Lecturer in Visual Studies at University of the Arts London, she initiated the Artist-in-Residence programme at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada in 2011. 

From 2019–24 Ann Marie was Strategic Head of Culture and Heritage for Barking and Dagenham Council in the East End of London where she led on key projects including the development of the Women's Museum and A House for Artists. 

Ann Marie is a Doctoral Researcher at Tate Gallery in the UK, where her work focuses on the development of innovative co-custodianship models for public collections.

Bimpe Nkontchou

Bimpe Nkontchou is a lawyer and wealth adviser, with over 35 years' experience in (Nigeria and the U.K) with an established multi-family office (based in London), which is focused on African entrepreneurs and their families.  She is ranked by Spears500 Directory as a ‘Top Family Office Service’ in the UK. 

Bimpe is a keen enthusiast and ‘activist collector’ of African art.  She views African art as an important legacy of the African continent, as well as being a valuable asset class.  She contributes regularly to conversations and formal discourse on promoting and developing the creative industries on the continent and has advised corporates, families and established artists in different models of philanthropy and methods of measuring the impact and the implementation of the support received from donors.  

Bimpe is a trustee of the Yinka Shonibare Foundation and G.A.S. Foundation (both founded by the celebrated Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare CBE), with the objective to build and support an artists’ residency in Lagos, Nigeria for artists of African heritage.  She is also a founding member of the African Art Acquisitions Committee of les Amis du Centre Pompidou (in Paris, France).  She is an advisor to the James Barnor Foundation (and jurist of the foundation’s annual prize), as well as being adviser and board member of Fondation MAM (in Cameroon) and also supports the Whitechapel Gallery in London as a Director’s Patron. 

Bimpe has been invited as panelist and speaker at events such as The Art Business Conference, the Museum of Photography of St Louis, Senegal (MUPHOS) and has been interviewed on the renowned Art Tactic podcast, as well as contributing an article in the TEFAF Journal (May 2020), exploring the different models of philanthropy in the arts.

Dr Cheryl Finley

Dr Cheryl Finley, Ph.D., is the Walton Endowed Professor and Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College. Committed to engaging strategic partners to transform the arts and culture industry, she leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest historically Black college and university consortium in preparing the next generation of African American museum and visual arts leaders.

A curator and contemporary art critic, Dr. Finley is also an award-winning author noted for Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2018), the first in-depth study of the most famous image associated with the memory of slavery—a schematic engraving of a packed slave ship hold—and the art, architecture, poetry, and film it has inspired since its creation in Britain in 1788. Her co-authored publications of note include My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South (Yale University Press, 2018), Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story(Carnegie Museum of Art, 2011), and Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos- Pons, Pamela Z (Prestel, 2008). A frequent essayist, Dr. Finley’s writing has appeared in numerous academic and popular publications, including Art Forum, Aperture, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly, and Small Axe. She serves on the Boards of Creative Capital, the Menil Foundation, Circuit Arts and Island Grown Initiative.

Dr. Finley’s current book project, Black Art Futures, is a social art history of the global Black arts ecosystem, focusing on the relationships among artists, patrons, curators, museums, galleries, art and activism. Her current exhibition, ‘Free as they want to be:’ Artists Committed to Memory, is co-curated with Dr. Deborah Willis and is currently on view at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, where she was on faculty for more than 20 years before retiring in 2024. She is a recipient of the 2025 Project for Empty Space Badass Art Woman Award.

Banji Chona

Banji is a Scholar of Zambezian Earth whose practice explores relationality, ancestral continuities, and reclamation. Through storytelling, healing practices, and community-based engagements, she interrogates colonial inheritances while offering alternative ways of being. Central to her work is Radical Zambezian Reimagination, a methodology for rethinking spatial, cultural, and ecological imaginaries through the epistemologies of communities shaped by the Zambezi River. The river is both place and metaphor, linking rains, aquifers, wetlands, oceans, and clouds. Banji uses “Zambezia” as a term of futurity, a call to imagine belonging through “river thinking” that transcends borders and nurtures ecological and spiritual kinships.

Dr Janine Francois

Dr Janine Francois is a Black British feminist scholar whose work explores climate justice through Black feminism, anti-colonial theory, and feminist ethics of care. She is Associate Professor and Director of Climate Justice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her interdisciplinary practice bridges academic research, curatorial inquiry, and public engagement.

Francois has held residencies at LCC Studios, Guest Projects Africa, and Hackney Museum, and is an Asiko Art School alumna. She has curated and contributed to programmes at Tate Britain, the V&A, INIVA, Autograph, the Barbican, National Portrait Gallery, and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, centring community-rooted approaches to knowledge and cultural memory.

Her writing appears in The Independent, Architectural Review, VICE, and the Journal of Visual Culture. She is completing her debut book, which repositions the Atlantic Ocean as a geography shaped by slavery, colonialism, and climate crisis.

Ala Praxis

Ala Praxis is a research-driven art collective committed to addressing urgent environmental and human challenges through pioneering experiments at the intersection of art, science, technology, and society. As an interdisciplinary group, we draw on the diverse expertise of anthropologists, architects, animators, design and visual artists, curators, writers, worldbuilders, sound artists, and experimental thinkers. Together, we investigate, ideate, and create imaginative responses to the pressing societal issues of our time, particularly those linked to the environment and cultural preservation. Our practice is rooted in research and experimental methodologies that deepen our understanding of the intricate connections between human existence and the systems that sustain it. Through this work, we aim to reconnect people with the complex web of life around us, proposing new ways of thinking about our shared futures and the role art can play in shaping more equitable, sustainable worlds.

Eve Oishi

Eve Oishi (She/They) is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Their primary research interests include Asian American and Asian diasporic cultural studies, independent and experimental media art, transnational media, and gender and queer theory. They are the recipient of several postdoctoral fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Marta Sutton Weeks External Faculty Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and Fellow-in-Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. Oishi’s monograph Partial Form: An Experimental History of Asian American Cinema is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Oishi has published on numerous topics concerning gender studies and Asian American media in anthologies and journals including Feminist Media Histories, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Missla Libsekal

Missla Libsekal (b. Addis Abeba, Ethiopia) is an independent curator and writer whose practice deals with alterity and knowledge transmission. Her long-term interdisciplinary research focuses on historically marginalised ways of knowing, with the current chapter considering what stories of living in the land can offer better ways of being in relation with the places that we inhabit and occupy? Since 2023, Libsekal has curated exhibitions and talks for the annual ART X Lagos platform. She is based in Vancouver, Canada in the unceded, ancestral territories of  the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Adjoa Armah

Adjoa Armah is an artist, educator, and writer. Her practice meditates on memory and the layered realities we carry within our bodies. Drawing on personal and collective histories, she navigates the intersections of grief, cultural memory, and resilience, particularly as they emerge within diasporic and post-colonial contexts. She is the founder of saman archive, a gathering of photographic negatives encountered across Ghana.  

Armah’s work has been presented internationally, including at Auto Italia, Swiss Institute, fluent, Hauser & Wirth, Delfina Foundation, Espace Niemeyer, and Salone De Mobile.  Armah is also currently a practice-led DPhil researcher in Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. Through her doctoral research, she engages with concepts of unstable ground, considering sand, soil, sea, and various mutable landscapes as metaphors for identity: shifting, porous and constantly reshaped by external factors. 

Moni Aisida

Moni Aisida is an arts leader with a multidisciplinary background spanning fintech, healthcare, and visual arts. As the Executive Director of Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, she brings about ten years of cross-sector experience into her arts leadership practice, having previously contributed to the growth of leading cultural organisations such as SMO Contemporary Art, ART X Lagos, and Affinity Gallery. Her work across these institutions has consistently centred on strategic marketing, stakeholder engagement, and operational development.

At G.A.S. Foundation, Moni sets the strategic vision and oversees the foundation’s activities across two sites in Nigeria, an urban residency space in Lagos and a 54-acre ecological site in Ikise, Ogun State. Since assuming leadership in 2024, she has significantly expanded the foundation’s reach and programme impact, deepening local engagement while elevating its global presence.

Moni has led the design and implementation of strategic programmes such as the Ìmọ̀rà Arts Intensive and The Story of Food Project, which centre educational and professional development for artists and cultural workers. She has also prioritised increasing the representation of local Nigerian artis

She is best known for her work with bringing to the fore, emerging art practices, and institutions.