Zina Saro-Wiwa

Zina Saro-Wiwa (b. 1976, Port Harcourt, Nigeria) is an artist working primarily with video but also photography, sculpture, sound, film and food. She lives and works in Los Angeles as well as running a practice in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where she founded the contemporary art gallery Boys’ Quarters Project Space for which she regularly curates. Saro-Wiwa is one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Global Thinkers of 2016 recognized for her work in the Niger Delta. She was Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn 2016-2017 and in April 2017 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts. She has shown regularly at biennales, museums and galleries around the world and has been named Artist-in-residence at UCLA where she is launching an experimental think tank and art project that renegotiates the relationship between knowledge and art production. Saro-Wiwa’s interest lies in expanding our understanding of environmentalism, deconstructing decoloniality and mapping emotional landscapes. She often explores highly personal experiences, carefully recording their choreography, making tangible the space between internal experience and outward performance as well as bringing cross-cultural and environmental/geographic considerations to bear on these articulations.