Nana Oforiatta Ayim

Nana Oforiatta Ayim
August 2015, Chale Wote Street Art Festival

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Ghanaian writer, art historian and filmmaker.

Writing

Her first novel will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2017.^[1]

Art history

She is the founder and director of the cultural research organisation, ANO, in Ghana.^[2] After writing extensively on contemporary African arts and creating numerous research and exhibition projects internationally, she established ANO as a permanent centre in Ghana in 2012.^[3][4] In 2016, she created the online version of the pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, "a large-scale documentation and archive project, dedicated to the re/ordering of knowledge, narratives and representations from and about the African continent".^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

Exhibitions she has curated include the first exhibition in London of photographs by James Barnor at Black Cultural Archives during the "Ghana at 50" jubilee season in 2007,^[10][11] and, more recently, Serge Attukwei Clottey's My Mother’s Wardrobe at Accra's Gallery 1957 in 2016.^{[12][13][14][15]}As creative director of various institutions in Accra, she is helping to build Ghana's cultural infrastructure.^[16][17][18]

Films

She became a filmmaker after working with economist Thi Minh Ngo and filmmaker Chris Marker on a new translation of his 1954 film Les Statues Meurent Aussi.^[19] Her films, which often have cultural themes, are a cross of fiction, travel essay, and documentary.^[20][21][22]

Awards and honours

She is the recipient of the 2015 Art & Technology Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)^[23] and of the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”.^[24][25]

She was named by The Africa Report as one of 50 African Trailblazers ^[26] and by Okayafrica as one of 12 African women making history.^[27]

She has sat on the juries of the Kuenyehia Prize for Arts and the TURN Award.^[28]

References