Nana Oforiatta-Ayim

Nana Oforiatta Ayim
August 2015, Chale Wote Street Art Festival

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Ghanaian writer, art historian and filmmaker.

Her first novel will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2017.

She is the founder and director of the cultural research organisation, ANO, in Ghana. After writing extensively on contemporary African arts and creating numerous research and exhibition projects internationally, she established ANO as a permanent centre in Ghana in 2012. In 2016, she created the online version of the pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, "a large-scale documentation and archive project, dedicated to the re/ordering of knowledge, narratives and representations from and about the African continent".

Exhibitions she has curated include the first exhibition in London of photographs by James Barnor at Black Cultural Archives during the "Ghana at 50" jubilee season in 2007, and, more recently, Serge Attukwei Clottey's My Mother’s Wardrobe at Accra's Gallery 1957 in 2016.As creative director of various institutions in Accra, she is helping to build Ghana's cultural infrastructure.

She became a filmmaker after working with economist Thi Minh Ngo and filmmaker Chris Marker on a new translation of his 1954 film Les Statues Meurent Aussi. Her films, which often have cultural themes, are a cross of fiction, travel essay, and documentary.

She is the recipient of the 2015 Art & Technology Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and of the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”.

She was named by The Africa Report as one of 50 African Trailblazers and by Okayafrica as one of 12 African women making history.

She has sat on the juries of the Kuenyehia Prize for Arts and the TURN Award.

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