About
First Name:
Last Name:
Title and Organization:
Bio:
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Art Historian who lives and works in Accra,
Ghana. She is Founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, through which she has
pioneered a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, a Mobile Museums Project, and curated
Ghana’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She published her first novel The God Child with
Bloomsbury in 2019, and with Penguin in German in 2021.
She has made award winning films for museums such as Tate Modern, LACMA and The New
Museum, and lectures a course on History and Theory at the Architectural Association in
London. She is the recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of the
Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; a Quartz Africa
Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of
2020 by Okayafrica.
She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which
“seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to
producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging workâ€; a 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship,
was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, was appointed to the Advisory
Council of Oxford University’s Cultural Programme in 2020, was a Principal Investigator on the
Action for Restitution to Africa programme, was awarded Woman of The Year Award in
Ghana in 2021, and the Dan David Prize, the world’s biggest history prize in 2022.
She is currently Special Advisor to the Ghanaian Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture on
Museums and Cultural Heritage.
Fellowship Program
Class
