Karimah Ashadu

Karimah Ashadu (born 1985 in London, United Kingdom) is a British-born Nigerian artist and film director whose multidisciplinary practice spans moving image, film, sculpture, photography, installation, painting, and experimental camera technologies. Raised in Nigeria and now working between Hamburg and Lagos, Ashadu focuses on labor, patriarchy, masculinity, economic precarity, migration, and the pursuit of personal independence within Nigeria and its diaspora. Her films frequently follow workers operating within informal or precarious economies, using sustained observation to consider how individuals negotiate social expectations, material limitations, and aspirations for autonomy.  In Machine Boys (2024), Ashadu follows Lagos okada motorcycle-taxi riders whose livelihoods were affected by a government ban on their informal transport economy. The film examines not only economic precarity and police harassment but also the self-fashioning, style, physicality, and masculine performance surrounding the riders. Presented with the brass sculpture Wreath, the work earned Ashadu the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Her subsequent film MUSCLE (2025) turns to bodybuilders in Lagos, extending her examination of masculinity by considering the body as a site of labor, investment, discipline, aspiration, and economic value. Ashadu received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and History of Art and Architecture from the University of Reading in 2007 and an MA in Spatial Design with a film specialization from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2011. She was subsequently a participant at De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2014 to 2016. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Camden Art Centre, MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Secession Vienna, Kunsthalle Bremen, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Canal Projects, and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. In 2020, she founded Golddust by Ashadu, a production company specializing in artists’ films centered on Black culture and African discourses. Her honors include the ars viva Prize, Prize of the Böttcherstraße, Silver Lion at Venice, Lichtwark-Förderpreis, and a 2026 honorary doctorate from University of the Arts London.