Olalekan Jeyifous

Olalekan Jeyifous (born 1977 in Ibadan, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-American artist, architect, and designer whose multidisciplinary practice explores architecture, community, environmental change, and the social possibilities of urban space. Working across public art, installation, sculpture, drawing, digital collage, photomontage, virtual reality, and architectural design, Jeyifous examines contemporary political and ecological realities through speculative environments and richly detailed imagined futures.  Jeyifous received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 2000. His work often engages Black urban life, African diasporic histories, emerging technologies, infrastructure, climate change, gentrification, and environmental justice, using physical and digital world-building to envision societies that exist between utopia and dystopia. His projects combine historical research, architectural representation, science fiction, and Afro-surrealist imagery to challenge existing systems while proposing alternative relationships among people, place, and the natural environment.  His work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Vitra Design Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, and Venice Architecture Biennale. He received the Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2024 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship, and the 2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize. Olalekan Jeyifous lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.