David Sanou

David Sanou (born 1969, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) is a Burkinabè artist and master sculptor whose masquerade practice explores cultural continuity, social prestige, family lineage, and innovation within Bobo-Dioulasso’s masquerade traditions. Working across carved wooden headpieces and full masquerade commissions, Sanou examines how inherited forms can remain socially and ceremonially active while also adapting to contemporary patrons, museums, and new visual demands.  Sanou is a third-generation sculptor who assumed artistic control of his father André Sanou’s studio in 2009 after his father’s retirement. His work often engages masquerade, funerary commemoration, patronage, and artistic inheritance, using carved wood and collaborative costume production to consider both fidelity to regional mask genres and the creation of new forms, including “Compromise Kimi” headpieces and emblematic portraits of deceased community members danced in annual funeral celebrations.  His work has been featured in New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, first shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2025 and then traveling to the Frist Art Museum, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. Museum sources also note that his clientele includes chiefs, affluent masquerade patrons, and museums abroad. David Sanou lives and works in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso.