About

Writer. Filmmaker. Art Historian. Polymodernist.

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Art Historian. Whilst researching for her Masters in African Art History, she realised all the terms and concepts used to describe Ghanaian artistic expression were Western ones, and that it was near to impossible in her academic research to find philosophies or theories that stemmed from the context within which they were made. Her research process led her to the Ayan, a form of telling history in Ghana; and the Afahye, a historical exhibition or Gesamtkunstwerk model.

She began researching both models, giving talks and lectures, - such as through her course on reimagining ontologies, archives and institutions at the Architectural Association in London -; and through her essays on how these methodologies could be used to think and write about Ghanaian, and African, cultural expressions, - such as in African Metropolitan Architecture. She also began actively using these models in her own writing; her novel, The God Child, published by Bloomsbury in the UK & US (2019, 2020) and in Germany by Penguin (2021); her exhibitions, including Ghana’s first ever pavilion for the Venice Biennale which she initiated and curated (https://www.anoghana.org/ghanafreedom); and her film work which used the form of the Ayan as an organising and structural principle & has been shown at spaces like LACMA, Tate Modern and The New Museum. She founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge (https://www.anoghana.org/) in order to expand on this work and through it developed a number of large-scale projects, such as a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia that strives to trace indigenous knowledge systems and ontologies through the African continent (http://culturalencyclopaedia.org/ & https://www.notion.so/561abfdabe6d4c4a9b46f968214a2e81? v=66ddfb21ed504c269a5b6a432caab316); and a Mobile Museums project that travels into communities across Ghana in order to uncover the best possible model for its context (https://www.anoghana.org/mobilemuseums).

She has recently been named Special Advisor to the Minister of Tourism, Arts & Culture in Ghana and Director at Large for Ghana’s Museums and Cultural Heritage, and is working on bringing her work on what kinds of cultural structures, narratives and institutions could be right for the Ghanaian, and possibly wider African context, to a national scale (https://www.ghanaheritagefuture.com/).

She has been widely recognized for her work with honors that include being named one of the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; a Quartz Africa Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of 2020 by Okayafrica. She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”; a 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship, was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, was appointed to the Advisory Council of Oxford University’s Cultural Programme in 2020, was a Principal Investigator on the Action for Restitution to Africa programme, and received the Ghana Woman of the Year Award in 2021.