Senam Okudzeto

Biobibliography:

Senam Awo Okudzeto is a British-American artist and writer of Ghanaian of Ghanaian and U.S descent. Her research and practice investigates previously overlooked socio-political histories in the context of art, architecture, modernity, memory and material culture with a particular focus on West Africa and its Diasporas. Okudzeto has a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts  (painting) from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1995), a Master’s degree in painting from the Royal College of Art, London, (1997). She completed the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000). She is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has taught at institutions in Europe, West Africa and the USA. She was the 2018–2019 Visiting Professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) and has taught at numerous institutions including the Kunsthistorisches Seminar, University of Basel, NYU (New York and Accra campuses), Occidental College, and Loyola College, New Orleans. She is the founder of Art in Social Structures, a now semi-dormant Ghanaian NGO that promotes heritage and educational initiatives in Ghana and has also organized academic conferences in West Africa including two national media campaigns in Ghana on heritage in the arts and workshops at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and Yaba College of Technology, Lagos and at the Alliance Française, Accra. Okudzeto is the recipient of several fellowships and awards including a Graham Foundation Grant for her project “Geomancy, Modernity and Memory: Unofficial and Unrecognized Historic Civic Centers in Ghana (2017), and the Edith Bloom/Jesse Howard Junior Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015 – 2016), a research fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2003 – 2004).