Sir John Akomfrah

Sir John Akomfrah (born May 4, 1957, in Accra, Ghana) is a Ghanaian-born British artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, migration, postcolonialism, race, temporality, and the environmental and political conditions shaping global modernity. Working across film, video installation, photography, writing, and curatorial practice, Akomfrah examines diasporic experience, historical violence, and collective remembrance through archival montage, multichannel moving-image environments, poetic narration, and layered sound.  Akomfrah studied sociology at the University of Portsmouth and was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective in London in 1982. His work often engages archives, social history, Black British identity, colonial aftermaths, and ecological crisis, using essay film, documentary strategies, montage, and immersive installation to consider how histories of displacement, resistance, and belonging are carried across image, landscape, and voice. His practice is especially noted for bringing together archival fragments and newly shot footage to create expansive meditations on migration, memory, and loss.  His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Lisson Gallery, Tate, and other major international institutions and exhibitions. He won the Artes Mundi Prize in 2017, was elected a Royal Academician in 2019, and was knighted in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to the arts. Sir John Akomfrah lives and works in London.