Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Tizta Berhanu (1991- ) is an Ethiopian painter. Her figurative pieces explore intimacy and emotion. Vibrant and subdued colors cushion her subjects. Her paintings are typically composed of various hues of a singular color, heightening the emotional reality of the work.  Berhanu received her BFA in Painting from Addis Ababa University, Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in 2019. 

Tomashi Jackson (1980- ) is an American multimedia artist working across printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, fibrework, and performance. Jackson's assemblages are entrenched in a deep research process centered around systemic abuse, disenfranchisement, and displacement of communities of color. She connects histories and archives with to present moment.  Jackson received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2010. She received her MS from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in 2012 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2016.

Tom Lloyd (b. 1929 – d. 1996) was an American artist, activist, and community organizer known for pioneering work in electronically programmed light sculpture and socially-engaged art. He studied at the Pratt Institute (1949–1952) and the Brooklyn Museum Art School (1961) and began making art that fused abstraction, technology and community activism in the 1960s. Lloyd’s sculptural works harnessed electric bulbs, lenses, wiring and motion to explore light, perception and presence; he also co-founded the exhibition and institutional arm of Black and Puerto Rican art through community spaces such as the Store Front Museum / Paul Robeson Theatre in Jamaica, Queens. 

Torkwase Dyson (1973- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, and sound. Her work is inspired by her theory of Black Compositional Thought. Describing herself as a painter, her abstract works explore the relationship between continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture and how black and brown people negotiate space.   Dyson received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999. She received her MFA in painting/printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2003.

Torkwase Dyson (born 1973, Chicago, Illinois) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the relationship between Black spatial practices, architecture, and environmental conditions. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, Dyson investigates how Black bodies navigate and shape space, particularly in relation to histories of displacement, resistance, and freedom. Her practice is grounded in an ongoing inquiry into what she terms “Black spatial liberation,” a framework that considers how geography, infrastructure, and environmental systems impact movement, visibility, and autonomy. Dyson’s visual language is rooted in abstraction, often employing geometric forms, architectural diagrams, and minimal color palettes to evoke structures such as walls, corridors, and enclosures. These forms reference both physical and conceptual spaces, including carceral systems, migratory routes, and ecological environments. Through this approach, she creates works that function as both visual propositions and spatial experiments, inviting viewers to consider alternative modes of inhabiting space. Her work also engages environmental justice, climate change, and the politics of land and water, particularly as they affect Black and marginalized communities. Dyson’s installations often transform exhibition spaces into immersive environments that foreground movement, orientation, and bodily awareness. By merging abstraction with critical spatial theory, she expands the possibilities of contemporary art as a tool for imagining new forms of freedom and relation. Dyson has exhibited widely at major institutions and biennials, and her work is held in significant public collections. She lives and works in New York.

Tourmaline (born 1983, Roxbury, Massachusetts) is an American artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose practice centers Black trans life, queer history, abolitionist thought, and the radical possibilities of freedom. Working across film, photography, installation, writing, and public history, she creates works that honor historical figures, recover overlooked narratives, and imagine liberatory futures rooted in pleasure, care, and collective memory. Her practice moves fluidly between archival research and speculative worldmaking, using visual and narrative strategies to foreground the lives and legacies of Black trans women and queer communities too often excluded from dominant historical accounts.  Tourmaline studied Comparative Ethnic Studies at Columbia University, a foundation that continues to shape her interdisciplinary approach to art and political memory. Her work often draws from community history, performance, and cinematic storytelling to build emotionally resonant portraits of resistance, intimacy, and transformation. Across her films and visual art, she returns to themes of Black feminist freedom, trans embodiment, joy as a political force, and the power of reimagining the archive.  Her work has been exhibited internationally and included in major museum presentations and collections. Tourmaline has participated in the Whitney Biennial and has had work shown at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Museum Brandhorst. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Tate, and the Whitney. She is also a Guggenheim Fellow and a TIME100 honoree. Tourmaline lives and works in New York. 

Toyin Ojih Odutola (1985- ) is a Nigerian-American artist who creates works on paper. She is interested in skin texture and has reduced her materials to the basics, such as ballpoint pens, pencils, pastels, and charcoal. This results in a very distinctive mark-making style. Developed over months, narratives that emerge through a series resemble a chapter book. Recently, she has created works around landscapes, architecture, and domestic interiors.  Odutola received a BA from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and an MFA from the California College of the Arts. 

Tsedaye Makonnen (b. 1984, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, researcher, and cultural producer. Makonnen’s practice weaves together Black feminist theory, site-specific research, performance, installation, sculpture, textile work, film, and curatorial projects. Her work is deeply informed by her identities as the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, a mother, doula, and sanctuary builder. 

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (1992- ) works across painting, drawing, and printmaking to explore his Nigerian Yoruba background. With a focus on contemporary perceptions of the Black body, Adeniyi-Jones depicts figures captured mid-dance as a tool to illuminate the significance of body language and dance in a continent with numerous spoken languages. Androgynous forms, deities, and animals populate his work in a celebration and acknowledgment of African identity.  Adeniyi-Jones received his BFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 2014 and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2017. 

Turiya Magadlela (1978- ) is a South African artist using textiles with charged stories to create work. Her materials range from pantyhose to correctional service uniforms. Magadlela's work focuses on her experiences with womanhood and motherhood and the loaded history of Black South Africans. Magadlela received her Certificate in Fine Arts from Funda Community College in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1998. She received her National Diploma of Fine Arts from University of Johannesburg, South Africa in 2001. 

Tyler Mitchell (1995- ) is an American, Atlanta born and based fine art and commercial photographer. Much of his fine photography is focused on Black leisure and joy. He seeks to create a "Black utopic vision" with an emphasis on Black enjoying and existing outdoors. His bold colors are moody and contemplative. In 2018 Mitchell was commissioned to photograph Beyoncé for the Vogue September edition. In doing so, he became one of the youngest photographers and the first Black photographer to photograph a Vogue cover. 

Uche Okeke (born April 30, 1933, in Nimo, Anambra State, Nigeria – died January 5, 2016) was a Nigerian artist whose multidisciplinary practice explored Igbo visual culture, postcolonial identity, modernism, folklore, and the development of a distinctly Nigerian artistic language. Working across painting, drawing, illustration, sculpture, and writing, Okeke examined cultural memory, indigenous knowledge, and national self-definition through linear abstraction and the theoretical framework he called “Natural Synthesis.”  Okeke studied fine art at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, later incorporated into Ahmadu Bello University, where he became a founding member and leading voice of the Zaria Art Society. His work often engages folklore, social history, indigenous design systems, and aesthetic theory, using line, calligraphic mark-making, and adaptations of uli wall and body painting traditions to consider decolonization, modern African identity, and the relationship between local tradition and contemporary artistic form. After the Nigerian Civil War, he became head of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he helped shape what became known as the Nsukka School.  His work has been exhibited through major presentations on Nigerian modernism and postcolonial African art, including at Tate Modern and in collections and exhibitions connected to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art. He is widely recognized as a foundational figure in Nigerian modernism and as one of the key theorists of post-independence African art. Uche Okeke lived and worked in Nigeria, including Nsukka and Nimo. 

Uman (born 1980, Somalia) is a self-taught, Somali-born, New York–based artist whose vivid paintings, sculptures, and works on paper are known for their ecstatic color, intuitive mark-making, and deeply personal symbolism. She grew up in Kenya before immigrating to the United States as a teenager, eventually settling in upstate New York.  Her practice draws from a rich blend of lived experience, cross-cultural identity, East African visual traditions, dreams, memory, and queer imagination. Working improvisationally, Uman creates compositions that oscillate between abstraction and figuration—spiraling patterns, biomorphic forms, mythic figures, and radiant color fields that feel both ritualistic and playful.  Uman’s work has gained major institutional recognition, including a 2024 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which introduced her vibrant and highly distinct visual language to a broader public. She has exhibited across the United States and internationally, and her work is held in prominent private and museum collections. Uman lives and works in upstate New York.

Unathi Mkonto (1982- ) is a South African artist working across drawing, installation and sculpture. Drawing is a foundational aspect of his practice. His drawings sometimes act as blueprints for his sculptures, referencing his background in architecture.  Mkonto's work is abstract and takes viewers through his life situating them spatially in everyone's experience.  He received his BA in Architecture from Nelson Mandela University. 

Uzo Egonu (1931–1996) was a Nigerian-born artist who settled in Britain and worked there for most of his career. He is widely acknowledged for merging his Igbo heritage and African visual culture with European modernist idioms—challenging conventional narratives about African art and modernity. 

vanessa german (b. 1976, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA) is an American sculptor, painter, performance artist, poet and community-activist who describes herself as a “citizen artist.” Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, German creates deeply expressive mixed-media sculptures and immersive installations that draw from found objects, ritual, storytelling and Afro-diasporic traditions. 

Velaphi George Mzimba (b. September 1959 – d. June 2021) was a South African painter known for his expressive, large-scale portraits, still lifes, and figurative works. Born in Dube, Soweto, his vibrant paintings reflect both the daily life and socio-political realities of township South Africa, merging aesthetic boldness with human dignity.

Veronica Ryan (born 1956, in Plymouth, Montserrat) is a British artist whose sculptural practice explores memory, migration, healing, care, and the layered histories of Caribbean and diasporic life. Working across sculpture, installation, assemblage, and drawing, Ryan examines absence, resilience, inheritance, and belonging through delicate arrangements of organic and manufactured materials, including seeds, pods, textiles, bronze, plaster, and found objects.  Ryan studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Slade School of Fine Art, and the University of London’s Institute of Education. Her work often engages botanical form, domestic space, loss, and postcolonial memory, using repetition, casting, stitching, and material juxtaposition to consider how personal and collective histories are carried through bodies, objects, and everyday acts of preservation. Her sculptures frequently evoke containment and fragility while attending closely to the afterlives of displacement and the sustaining forms of care that emerge within diasporic experience.  Her work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Brooklyn Museum, Spike Island, and in major international exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial. She received the Turner Prize in 2022, becoming the first Black woman to win the award. Veronica Ryan lives and works in New York and Bristol. 

Vickie Pierre (born in Brooklyn, New York) is a Haitian-American multimedia artist whose practice explores self-identity, femininity, dream states, mythology, and the cultural politics that shape Black diasporic experience. Working across painting, collage, works on paper, mixed media, and installation, Pierre examines psychological interiority, transformation, and ornamentation through anthropomorphic forms, layered decorative surfaces, and surreal visual language drawn from personal and diasporic memory.  Pierre earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1997. Her work often engages Haitian and Yoruba mythologies, fantasy, memory, and gendered representation, using pattern, glitter, decorative paper, and richly layered compositions to consider vulnerability, resilience, and the porous boundary between the sacred, the subconscious, and the bodily. Institutional and artist profiles describe her practice as one shaped by both deeply personal symbolism and broader diasporic cultural histories.  Her work has been exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Bass Museum of Art, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, Habitation Clément in Martinique, and the International Museum of Modest Arts in France. She received the South Florida Cultural Consortium Award in 2017, was a finalist for the Orlando Museum of Art’s Florida Prize in Contemporary Art in 2019, and in 2023 was selected by the Art in Embassies Program for display at the U.S. Embassy in Prague. Vickie Pierre lives and works in Vero Beach, Florida.

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.

Virgil Broodhagen is a Barbadian painter and sculptor known for his evocative depictions of Caribbean life, landscapes, and cultural narratives. He is the son of Karl Broodhagen, a prominent Barbadian sculptor and painter, and inherited a deep connection to Barbadian visual culture and identity.

Wangechi Mutu (1972- ) is a Kenyan-American visual artist, known for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Much of Mutu's work has explored the female body as subject through collage, installation, and performance. Mutu is She is interested in questions of gender, cultural trauma and transmission, and environmentalism. Her work also pulls from myths and cultural influences from the "Eastern" and "Western" pantheons creating a unique reference point. Strict dichotomies of East/West, beauty/grotesque, and sacred/profane are of little interest to her.  She is interested in that space in the middle where hybridity thrives.   Mutu received a BFA degree from Cooper Union in 1996 and an MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2000.

Wayne Lawrence @waynelawrence was born in St. Kitts and is now based in Brooklyn. His work represents a visual diary of his life’s journey and focuses on communities overlooked by mainstream media. Wayne’s photographs have been exhibited in a number of museums, including the African American Museum of Philadelphia.

Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) was a Cuban painter and printmaker of African and Chinese descent. He spent about 14 years in Spain starting in 1923 to 1938. He then moved to Paris before settling in New York. His art drew from personal experience during thee Spanish Civil War, both as a soldier and observer, and grief in his personal life. Lam was engaged in Modern movements such as Cubism and Surrealism. His work draws heavily from his experiences in Cuba with special attention to Afro-Caribbean religions such as Santería. He synthesized these two world views resulting in a visual language rich with thin figures, distinct, vertical linework, and a vibrant palette. 

Widline Cadet (born 1992, Haiti) is a Haitian-American artist whose photographic and video-based practice explores family, migration, memory, and the complexities of diasporic identity. Raised in the United States, Cadet often turns to her own family archive as both subject and method, creating images that navigate the emotional terrain of separation, reunion, and belonging across geographic and generational distances. She earned a BA in studio art from the City College of New York and an MFA from Syracuse University.  Working primarily in photography, Cadet constructs intimate, staged, and documentary-inflected portraits that center her mother, relatives, and extended community. Her work frequently examines the psychological and emotional impact of migration, particularly the experience of growing up between cultures and the evolving dynamics of familial relationships shaped by displacement.  Cadet’s images often blur distinctions between performance and documentation, using gesture, proximity, and spatial arrangement to convey subtle emotional tensions. Her work emphasizes the body as a site of memory and connection, capturing moments that feel both deeply personal and widely resonant within diasporic experience. Through this approach, she expands contemporary portraiture to include layered reflections on identity, intimacy, and cultural inheritance. Her recent solo exhibitions include “Currents 40: Widline Cadet” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, USA (May 8–August 9, 2026); a solo exhibition at Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2025); PHotoESPAÑA at Casa de América, Madrid, Spain (2024); Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2023); and “Se Sou Ou Mwen Mete Espwa m (I Put All My Hopes On You)” at Deli Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2021).  Cadet lives and works in New York.

William H. Johnson (1910-1970) was an American painter. He worked through many styles throughout his life including academic, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, German Expressionism, to "conscious naiveté” or a folk style. In 1926 he traveled to France and this is credited as some of his earliest exposure to modernist forms. He traveled around Europe and returned to New York in 1938 at the onset of World War II. On returning to the United States he d Johnson studied at the National Academy of Design in New York. 

William Pajuad (1925-2015) was an American painter. He is most known for his watercolor works. He often painted Black women, jazz funerals, street scenes, and memories of his childhood in New Orleans and his adult life in Los Angeles. He built the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Fine Art Collection, one of the best collections of Black art in the Western region.  Pajaud earned a BFA from Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans in 1941. He also received a degree in graphic design from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles.   

William Pajaud (born August 3, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana – died June 16, 2015) was an American artist whose painting and watercolor practice explored Black life, jazz, memory, Southern culture, and the dignity of everyday community. Working across watercolor, painting, printmaking, and design, Pajaud examined African American experience through lyrical figuration, vibrant color, and scenes drawn from New Orleans, Chicago, and Los Angeles.  Pajaud studied fine art at Xavier University of Louisiana and later studied graphic design at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. His work often engages music, Black family life, ritual, and neighborhood memory, using watercolor and figurative composition to consider celebration, resilience, and the cultural force of ordinary life. He was also a major curator and builder of Black art infrastructure through his role shaping the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Fine Art Collection, one of the most important corporate collections of African American art in the United States.  His work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and other institutions, and his work is held in collections including CAAM, the Hunter Museum, and the Pushkin Museum. He received honors including the PRSA Art Exhibition Award of Merit, the Paul Robeson Special Award for Contribution to the Arts, and the Samella Award. William Pajaud lived and worked in Los Angeles. 

Williams Chechet is a Nigerian visual artist. Known for his graphic design and murals, Chechet’s art takes inspiration from popular culture, hip hop, and graffiti. Heavily influenced by his personal background, his work combines the visual narratives of the past with that of the present.

Wilson Bigaud (1931-2010) was a Haitian painter. Many of his works depict daily life in Haiti. His early style emphasized perspective and volume and an awareness of the effects of light and shadow. He was a friend and contemporary of Hector Hyppolite. 

Winsom Winsom (1946- ) is a Maroon-Canadian multidisciplinary artist working across textiles, painting, video, and installation. Her work focuses on African spirituality, freedom, and resilience. The religions of Ifa and Ashanti deeply inspire her. Winsom co-founded the Kingston's Black Women's Collective.  Winsom studied at the Jamaica School of Art between 1965 and 1968.

Woody De Othello (born 1991, in Miami, Florida) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores spirit, domestic life, embodiment, and the emotional charge of everyday objects. Working across ceramics, bronze, wood, painting, and installation, De Othello examines the relationship between body, home, and psychic life through warped, anthropomorphic forms that transform clocks, telephones, fans, mirrors, and other familiar objects into uncanny vessels of presence and feeling.  De Othello earned a BFA from Florida Atlantic University in 2013 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. His work often engages ritual, ancestry, domestic space, and the spiritual resonance of objects, using clay, bronze, wood, and glaze to consider how ordinary things can hold memory, force, and emotional residue. Multiple sources connect his practice to the West and Central African concept of nkisi, positioning his sculptures as containers of energy and interior life rather than simply representations of household things.  His work has been exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Whitney Biennial, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the San Jose Museum of Art, and galleries including Karma and Jessica Silverman. His work is held in collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Woody De Othello lives and works in Oakland, California.

Xaviera Simmons (born 1974, in New York, New York) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores race, power, history, language, landscape, and the social construction of American identity. Working across photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture, and installation, Simmons examines visibility, citizenship, political memory, and the layered histories embedded in public and institutional space through conceptual image-making, archival inquiry, and materially varied forms.  Simmons received a BFA from Bard College in 2004 and also studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Joseph Beuys Research Project in Düsseldorf. Her work often engages archives, political action, Blackness, language, and social history, using staged and documentary photography, performance, installation, and text to consider how race, capital, and ideology shape the ways bodies move through landscape, civic life, and historical narrative. MoMA materials around her Archive as Impetus project especially emphasize her sustained engagement with institutional history, political gesture, and the archive as a living site of struggle.  Her work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and major international exhibitions and institutional programs. Her work is held in collections including MoMA and the Guggenheim. Xaviera Simmons lives and works in New York.

Xenobia Bailey (b. 1955, Seattle, WA, USA) is an American fine-artist, designer, fiber-art pioneer and cultural activist whose practice re-imagines everyday materials, craft traditions and Afro-diasporic aesthetics through an aesthetic she terms “Fun(k)tional Design.”  She began her career designing crocheted hats and wearable art before scaling up to monumental hand-crocheted mandalas, large-scale installations, public mosaics and immersive environments. Her work fuses textile craft, urban design references, African cosmological motifs and a vibrant, layered palette of color and texture. Bailey’s mission extends beyond making art to creating visual languages of empowerment, visibility, joy and connection rooted in Black homes, households, and community spaces. 

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (1962- ) is a Nigerian-British interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, printmaking, painting, film, and photography. His work examines Western art history and literature and questions cultural and national constructs of identity. With an interest in globalization, he explores the relationship between Africa and Europe and their histories. Shinobard studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London in 1989 and received his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London in 1991. 

Yukultji Napangati (born c. 1970, near Kiwirrkurra, Western Australia) is a Pintupi artist whose paintings are deeply connected to Country, Dreaming narratives, and ancestral knowledge. Working within the Central and Western Desert painting traditions, Napangati creates expansive, rhythmic compositions that map sacred sites, travel routes, and water sources associated with her family’s Country. Her work is characterized by subtle shifts of color, layered dotting, and dynamic surface movement that translate cultural knowledge into contemporary abstraction. Napangati’s paintings communicate continuity, custodianship, and the living presence of Indigenous law and land.

Zana Masombuka (1995- ) is a South African conceptual artist. She works across photography, film, sculpture, and performance. Her work is focused on the intersection of tradition and the modern world in African cultures. She believes humans are spiritual beings, in addition to our physical selves. She is an advocate for Africans interpreting and re-interpreting their histories on their own terms, positioning themselves as global leaders.  Masombuka received her BA from Stellenbosch University in 2017. 

Zanele Muholi FRPS (1972- ) is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation.  Muholi's work focuses on race, gender, and sexuality within a South African context and is a direct response to the dangerous conditions that LGBTQ+ people face in rural townships. For Muholi, this expands queer history and narratives in South Africa. Another ongoing series is, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), where they take self-portraits which act as a retelling of South Africa's history. Muholi completed an Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg in 2003. They received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Documentary Media from Ryerson University, Toronto in 2009.

Zéh Palito (1991- ) is a Brazilian painter whose practice seeks to encourage mutual respect between humans and the natural world. He draws inspiration from Brazilian and African cultures. The subjects of his paintings coexist in fantastical landscapes with plants and animals in harmony. The bright and vibrant palette communicates joy and self-assurance. Despite the cheerful work, his work also speaks to darker political realities and their related trauma.  Palito received his degree in Graphic Design from the Faculty of Administration and Arts of Limeira (FAAL) and his certificate in Fine Art from the Municipal School of Culture and Arts (EMCEA), both in Brazil. 

Zizipho Poswa (1979- ) is a South African ceramicist. Poswa's work is a celebration of her Xhosa heritage. She works to highlight the strength of women and their cultural traditions. 

Zohra Opoku (born 1976, in Altdöbern, former GDR / East Germany) is a Ghanaian-German artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores identity formation, memory, migration, cultural inheritance, and the social and political meanings of dress and textile culture. Working across textiles, photography, installation, performance, video, and printmaking, Opoku examines belonging, ancestry, and self-representation through screen-printed fabrics, garments, self-portraiture, and materially layered installations rooted in personal and collective histories.  Opoku trained in fashion and photography and holds an M.A. in Fashion from Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Born and raised in East Germany and later relocating to Ghana to reconnect with her ancestral roots, she often uses fabric, clothing, and photographic imagery as carriers of memory and historical meaning. Her work engages archives, family history, healing, and Black diasporic visual culture, using dyed and screen-printed textiles, collage, and installation to consider how identity is shaped by personal experience as well as larger cultural, historical, and socioeconomic forces.  Her work has been exhibited at Zeitz MOCAA, Sharjah Biennial 15, DAK’ART 2022, the Athens Biennale, and in exhibitions with Mariane Ibrahim and other international venues. She has also presented major projects including We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight, her first museum survey exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA. Zohra Opoku lives and works in Accra, Ghana.