Victoria-Idongesit Udondian

Victoria-Idongesit Udondian (born 1982, in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria) is a Nigerian artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores labor, migration, Black history, postcolonial identity, and the global circulation of clothing and textile waste. Working across textile installation, sculpture, performance, painting, and socially engaged practice, Udondian examines how garments carry histories of trade, power, memory, and self-fashioning through stitched, repurposed, and materially layered forms.  Udondian studied painting at the University of Uyo and later earned an MFA in Sculpture and New Genres from Columbia University; she also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Before formally studying art, she trained as a tailor and fashion designer, a background that remains central to her practice. Her work often engages textiles, archives, social history, and the secondhand clothing economy, using fabric manipulation, installation, and performance to consider cultural identity, invisible labor, environmental extraction, and the afterlives of colonial exchange.  Her work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon, the 56th Venice Biennale, the British Textile Biennial, and other international venues, and she has received a MacDowell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grant. She lives and works between Lagos and New York.