Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983) is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California.

Through her art, Akunyili Crosby "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds".

Njideka Akunyili was born in 1983 and raised in Enugu, Nigeria.

She is of Igbo descent and grew up bilingual in Igbo and English.

One of six siblings, Akunyili Crosby's father, Chike Akunyili, was a surgeon and her mother, Dora Akunyili, was a professor of pharmacology at the University of Nigeria, and the former director of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration.

Akunyili Crosby moved to Lagos when she was thirteen years old to attend the secondary school Queen's College (QC) Yaba, Lagos.

Her mother won the U.S. green card lottery for the family, enabling Akunyili Crosby and her siblings to move to the United States and to get financial aid to study there.

In 1999, at the age of 16, she left Nigeria with her sister, Ijeoma, and moved to the United States.

She spent a gap year studying for her SAT's and taking American history, science, and calculus classes before returning to Nigeria to serve a year of National Service.

After she completed her service, she returned to the United States to study in Philadelphia.

She took her first oil painting class at the Community College of Philadelphia where her teacher Jeff Reed encouraged her to apply to Swarthmore College.

She graduated Swarthmore College in 2004, where she studied art and biology as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

She was at first getting pre-medical requirements to pursue a career in medicine before deciding to pursue art.

She didn't pursue art until her senior year at Swarthmore after realizing she enjoyed her art classes more than her Organic Chemistry and Advanced Biology classes.

She felt the urgency to tell her experience as a Nigerian in the diaspora through her art.

After graduating from Swarthmore in 2004, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

This is where she earned a post-baccalaureate certificate in 2006.

She later attended the Yale University School of Art, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.

After graduating from Yale in 2011, Akunyili Crosby was selected as artist-in-residence at the highly regarded Studio Museum in Harlem, known for promoting and supporting emerging African artists.

During this residency she met her mentor, New-York based artist, Wangechi Mutu.

She spent her year of residence experimenting with drawing, figure painting, studying contemporary art, postcolonial history and diasporic studies.

In 2015, Jamillah James, a former Studio Museum in Harlem curator and at the time, assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, organized Akunyili Crosby's first solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum.

That same year, James organized another exhibition of Akunyili Crosby's work at Art and Practice in Los Angeles.

In 2016, Akunyili Crosby was named one of the Financial Times Women of the Year." That same year, a solo exhibition of Akunyili Crosby's work was held at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.

In 2017, Akunyili Crosby was awarded the prestigious Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

In 2017, Akunyili Crosby won the MacArthur Fellowship Genius grant.

In 2018, Akunyili Crosby designed the mural that wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. The mural features her signature style of combining painting with collage, printmaking, and drawing to create intricate, layered scenes.

She was the second artist to create a mural for the site under a new initiative by the museum.

“Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…)” (2021) was commissioned for the Met's exhibition, Before Yesterday We Could Fly.

Akunyili Crosby's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Her work was also featured in the National Portrait Gallery's 2023 Kinship exhibit alongside fellow artists Ruth Leonela Buentello, Jess T. Dugan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jessica Todd Harper, Thomas Holton, Sedrick Huckaby, and Anna Tsouhlarakis.

She uses photos she has taken herself in Nigeria along with family photos and pages from popular Nigerian magazines.

The photos "are layers in her work by collage and acetone-transfer prints, creating a fabric of images throughout her paintings".

Her primary mediums include collage, photo transfer, acrylic paint, charcoal, fabric, and colored pencil.

Along with strong Nigerian influence, her style is also derived from pop culture, personal experience, and Western academia.

While creating, she thinks of her dual audience: American and Nigerian.

However, her work cannot be categorized as either American nor Nigerian, but rather the work is an autobiography based on her "character that doesn't fit into a box."

Women are in a position of power in most of her work.

She believes a woman's agency is to not be questioned and she is an active participant.

Akunyili Crosby also wanted to create images of interracial marriage that she had never seen growing up in Nigeria.