Angelique Kidjo is a five-time Grammy Award winner, singer-songwriter, actress, and activist. Time Magazine has called her “Africa's premier diva,” and named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021. Throughout her career, Kidjo has cross-pollinated the West African traditions of her childhood in Benin with elements of American R&B, funk, and jazz, as well as influences from Europe and Latin America. As a performer, her striking voice, stage presence, and fluency in multiple cultures and languages have won respect from her peers and expanded her following across national borders. As an activist, Kidjo also travels the world advocating on behalf of children as a UNICEF international goodwill ambassador.

Internationally recognized fiber artist Abdoulaye Konaté creates large-scale textile-based installations using woven and dyed clothes, materials native to his homeland Mali. Drawing upon West African artistic traditions, he deploys cloth to address issues such as the roles of faith, conflict, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in contemporary society. Decades after formally training as a painter in Havana, Cuba, Konaté founded a fine arts program in Bamako to mentor a new generation of artists in Mali. His ambitious creations, realized with a team of assistants over the course of many months, are composed of thousands of hand-cut fabric strips. His works have been presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at major contemporary art venues in Dakar, Venice, and Kassel.

Pierre Thiam is an acclaimed Senegalese chef, author, and social activist based in New York City. Thiam is the executive chef and co-owner of the restaurant Teranga, as well as the founder of Yolélé Foods, which connects farmers in the Sahel with American markets. He has published four cookbooks and has won multiple awards for his advocacy and work. Known as a culinary ambassador who has brought West African cooking to the realm of fine dining, Thiam’s mission is to promote West African cuisine across the world.

Roderick McIntosh is the Clayton Stephenson Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. He is also the Curator-in-Charge (emeritus) of the Anthropology Division at the Peabody Museum and Honorary Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. McIntosh has conducted archaeological research in West Africa for over forty-five years, with a focus on ancient cities in the great Niger River floodplain of Mali. His research interests include African and Old World comparative prehistory and the intellectual history of prehistoric archaeology.

An archaeologist and art historian, Samuel Sidibé directed the National Museum of Mali from 1987 to 2017. He completed his undergraduate studies at l’Université de Paris 1, where he obtained a postgraduate doctorate in 1980. Since retiring from the museum, he has been the Director General of Mali National Park, adjacent to the National Museum, which develops recreation, conservation, and environmental and cultural education programs. Under his leadership, the National Museum, with its collection development, conservation, temporary exhibitions, and education programs, has become a major institution on the continent. Dr. Sidibé, in collaboration with his many international partners, has made a decisive contribution to the defense of African heritage against looting and illicit trafficking.

Baaba Maal is a Senegalese musical superstar who has been recording albums since the 1980s. The singer-guitarist belongs to the semi-nomadic Fulani people, and he sings in various languages including Pulaar, the Fulani dialect of the Senegal River valley. The artist has notably collaborated with Brian Eno, U2, Peter Gabriel, and Hans Zimmer, and he is especially known for his more recent work on the Black Panther soundtrack. Providing his own twist on traditional West African music, Maal is known as a voice for Africa and has performed around the world.

Daouda Keïta is Executive Director of the Musée National du Mali in Bamako, and an archaeologist and professor at the Université des Sciences Sociales et de Gestion de Bamako. In his work, Keïta has formed partnerships with local communities and created educational platforms to combat the trafficking of artifacts and looting of archaeological sites. He was one of the co-founders of “banques culturelles,” village museums created across Mali to provide communities with economic, social, and educational opportunities. Keïta is also one of the associate curators of the exhibition Dakar-Djibouti [1931-1933]: Counter Investigations (2025), and a coordinator of archival and field research in Mali and the Ivory Coast for the Franco-German Project Provenances des Objets Bamana du Mali (PROBAMA).

Mary Jo Arnoldi is curator emerita for African arts and ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. She has conducted research in West Africa over the past four decades and has published extensively on puppetry and performance in Mali. Her research interests include African ethnography with a focus on visual, material, and performing arts; post-colonial public culture, museum history, and museology; and African Diaspora in the New World.

Boureima Diamitani is the former Executive Director of the West African Museums Programme (WAMP). From Burkina Faso, Diamitani was the Director of Cultural Heritage and Museums in that country before attending graduate school at the University of Iowa, where he wrote his thesis on Komo societies among Tagwa-Senufo peoples. During his time as a Fulbright scholar, he worked as a fellow at the The Met and at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Diamitani is a published author and a scholar recognized for his contributions to emerging research and knowledge of West African art.

Nimely Napla is a director, master dancer, costume designer, and choreographer from Liberia. Napla came to the United States in the early 1980s when he served as director of the Liberian National Dance Company. He founded several performance companies, including the Nimely Pan African Dance Company, which has toured nationally, and he has annually hosted Panafest, a West African dance and drum performance. As an educator and artist, his community-based dance organization focuses on the study of cultural heritage and the performing arts. Over the years, Napla has developed a number of theatrical works inspired by Liberian cultural narratives and performances.

Naomi Diouf is an expert in West African dance, history, costume, song, and culture. She trained at the Kendeja Cultural Center for Indigenous Performers, studying with prominent dancers and musicians from Liberia and many other West African nations. Today, she is the executive artistic director of Diamano Coura West African Dance Company in Oakland, California. In the education space, Diouf is an advocate of the arts, and she has taught West African dance in California schools and abroad.

Photo credit: RJ Muna of San Francisco

Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and History at Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies. His research interests revolve around urban, political, social, and intellectual history in colonial and postcolonial Africa. He graduated with a PhD from the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and from 2000 to 2007, he was the Charles D. Moody Jr. Collegiate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of the History Department of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, and he served as Head of the Research, Information, and Documentation Department of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).

As a pioneer recognized for his invention of new sculptural genres, El Anatsui has garnered international acclaim. He supplemented his fine arts training at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, with careful study of classical African art forms and the creative output of local artisans. The natural and man-made materials he has harvested and adapted from his immediate environment have included tropical hardwood, broken ceramic pots, grain mortars, evaporated milk-tin lids, cassava graters, and driftwood. Born in Ghana, Anatsui has spent the majority of his career in Nigeria where he also taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In 2015, he received the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, a position he took after becoming an emeritus professor at Princeton, where he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy. Raised between Ghana and England, he is the author of numerous books and articles about ethics and moral philosophy, including In My Father’s House (1992) and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). Appiah has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Photo credit: Dan Turello

Suzanne Preston Blier is the Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. A historian of African art and architecture, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a former member of the Collège de France International Scientific and Strategic Committee (COSS). In 2017, Oba Aderemi Adedapo, Secretary General of the Yoruba Council of Yoruba Obas, gave Blier the Yoruba chieftaincy title of Otun Yeye Obalufon (“First/Right Mother of Obalufon”) in recognition of her research on Ife art and history.

Susan Mullin Vogel is a former museum director, curator, and filmmaker based in New York. She was the first curator of African art at The Met, Founding Director of the Museum for African Art, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, and Professor of Art History at Columbia University. She researched Baule art in Cote d'Ivoire during a 25-year period and is known for influential exhibitions, including a pioneering exhibition on 20th century African art, the first to present African photography. She has five documentaries in distribution, including three co-produced with the Musée National du Mali, and she has published widely, most recently on El Anatsui.

Photo Credit: Max Kozloff

Dame Magdalene Odundo is among the world’s most celebrated ceramic artists. She began her training as a graphic artist in Kenya. In 1971, she relocated to the United Kingdom, where her studies culminated at the Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts and the Royal College of Art. Her techniques merge historical African and contemporary global traditions. Recognition for her internationally acclaimed research and creative output has earned her many awards, including the African Art Recognition Award from the Detroit Institute of Arts, and honorary doctorates from the University of Florida and the University of the Arts, London. She was also appointed Officer of the Order of the British empire in 2008 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2020.

Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba is the Curator of African Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Previously, he was the Franciose Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Originally from Benin City, Nigeria, he earned a PhD in art history from the University of Florida, Gainesville, and his research specializes in the visual cultures of Olokun shrines. In addition to his museum work, Ezeluomba has published on the arts of Olokun shrines and on contemporary artist Obi Ekwenchi.

Photo credit: David Stover/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Jacob K. Olupona is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of African Religious Traditions, Harvard Divinity School at Harvard University, Cambridge. His earlier research ranged across African spirituality and ritual practices, spirit possession, Pentecostalism, Yorùbá festivals, animal symbolism, icons, phenomenology, and religious pluralism in Africa and the Americas. He has published and edited several books including City of 201 Gods: Ile Ife in Time, Space and the Imagination and African Religions: A Very Short Introduction. His most recent book In the Twilight of Time: Chief Lóòghò Bámátùlá, a Biography of an African Medicine Man explores conversion, indigenous knowledge, and healing through the life and work for Chief Lóòghò Bámátùlá.

Roslyn A. Walker, PhD is Curator Emerita and the Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). She previously served as the Senior Curator of The Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific. Prior to joining the DMA, Walker was the director of the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian, where she had also been senior curator. Throughout her career, she has curated many exhibitions and written multiple publications, including a monograph about the Nigerian artist Olowe of Ise, Olowe of Ise: A Yoruba Sculptor to Kings (1998).

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art

Nnenna Nduka (Iboko) was born in Calabar, Nigeria. An award-winning soprano and theater performer from childhood, she studied education at the University of Ibadan and the University of Nigeria. A long and successful career as an English teacher and choir mistress eventually led her to senior roles in educational administration. As an ordained Elder of the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, Nduka held various leadership positions in the Abiriba community, including president and trustee of the Abiriba Women’s Cultural Organization. Passionate about Abiriba culture and heritage, she has recorded many folktales, songs, and games, teaching them to generations of Abiriba children—most recently in North Carolina where she now lives with her family.

Ike Anya is an experienced public health physician working in Nigeria and the UK, an author, and 2007 TED Global Fellow. He is the co-founder of Nigeria Health Watch, EpiAfric, TEDxEuston, and past deputy director of public health at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Co-founder of the Abuja Literary Society, Anya is also an advisory council member of the Caine Prize and co-editor of The Weaverbird Collection of Nigerian Writing. His key publications include the memoir Small by Small and essays “People Don’t Get Depressed in Nigeria” (Granta) and “A Banner Without Stain” (in Of This Our Country, an anthology of Nigerian writers on Nigeria).

Photo credit: Sokari Higgwe at London Lighthouse Gallery and Studios

Ikem S. Okoye is Associate Professor of African Art and Architecture and Director of the African Studies Program at the University of Delaware. Okoye specializes in the painting, sculpture, and architecture of West Africa. His research interests also extend to global transactions in the arts from the mid-eighteenth century onward.​ Okoye is the editor of the first-ever electronic journal of African and diaspora art and culture, Ijele, and his work has been published in several journals in the United States and abroad.

Filipa Duarte de Almeida is anassociate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Omar Bongo University in Libreville, Gabon, specializing in Anthropology of African Religions. She holds a degree in Industrial Design from the Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication (IADE), a Masters in the History of Africa from the University of Lisbon, and a PhD in African Anthropology from Omar Bongo University. Her interdisciplinary research examines how the aesthetic qualities of objects connect to notions of agency and power in Gabon.

Wyatt MacGaffey is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Haverford College. In support of his extensive anthropological research on Central African society and culture, he was the recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and Ford Foundation Fellowship. MacGaffey has written six books and over twenty-five articles on art, politics, and religion in Kongo.

Cécile Fromont is a professor in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University whose research focuses on African visual, material, and religious culture in the vast Early Modern Atlantic. She also serves as the faculty director of the Cooper Gallery at the Hutchins Center. Fromont is the author of The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014), which received numerous awards, including the Albert J. Raboteau prize for Best Book in Africana Religions.

Photo credit: Dan Renzetti/Yale

Duro Olowu is a London-based artist, designer, and curator, whose innovative combinations of pattern and texture draw from his international background. Nigerian/British Olowu is noted for his fluency in combining diverse aesthetics and mediums and was named ‘New Designer of the Year’ at the British Fashion Awards in 2005, just one year after launching his eponymous womenswear label. He continues to show his bi-annual womenswear collections at London Fashion Week and his designs have been acquired by the Rhode Island School of Art and the FIT Museum. In recent years, Olowu has curated multiple contemporary art exhibitions to critical acclaim. His work was recently featured in the exhibition LOUVRE COUTURE: Art and Fashion (2025) at Musée de Louvre, Paris.

Photo credit: Uzoamaka Maduka

Alison Saar is a contemporary sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist whose works explore themes of gender, race, heritage, and history. Her creative practice draws upon a diverse range of personal, cultural, and artistic references to highlight the complexity of African diaspora and Black female identity. Her sculptural works and installations often incorporate found objects, including rough-hewn wood, tin ceiling panels, nails, shards of pottery and glass, and urban detritus. A recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowships, Saar currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work can be found in the collections of the Walker Institute in Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the High Museum in Atlanta.

Maaza Mengiste is an Ethiopian-American novelist, essayist, and photographer. Her most recent book, The Shadow King (2019), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and both this latest work and her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010), were included on numerous “best book of the year” lists. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim. Mengiste is also currently a Professor of English at Wesleyan University. The themes of both her writing and teaching focus on the individual lives at stake during conflict, migration, and political upheaval.

Photo credit: Nina Subin

Nessa Leibhammer’s research on southern Africa’s cultural traditions spans art history, archaeology, anthropology, museum theory, curating, and visual studies. Leibhammer is the former resident curator at the MTN Art Institute, and she also worked as the curator of southern African art at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Leibhammer has published extensively on topics ranging from the contemporary weavings of Allina Ndebele to provenance and historiographic questions relating to southern African arts. She has played an instrumental role in the curation of numerous exhibitions, including Transformed Fibers: Art from the African Continent and Evocations of the Child: Fertility Figures of the Southern African Region.

Sumayya Vally (b. 1990, South Africa) is the principal of the architecture and research practice Counterspace. She is the youngest architect ever commissioned for the Serpentine Pavilion, which she completed in 2021, and she was the Artistic Director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah. A TIME100 Next list honoree, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and Dezeen’s Emerging Architect of the Year 2023, Vally has been identified as someone who will shape the future of architectural practice and pedagogy. She is Honorary Professor of Practice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

Photo Credit: Lou Jasmine

Joël Andrianomearisoa is a Malagasy artist who lives and works between Antananarivo, Madagascar and Paris, France. He expresses himself through multiple mediums and emotions, adopting a plural approach inspired by his Malagasy roots but also by the world and its multiple geographies. Known for his large-scale textile installations, he has presented his work throughout the world as part of major collections such as the Smithsonian, the Sztuki Museum, Leal Rios Foundation, Zeitz Mocaa, and Musée d'Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden. In 2019, Andrianomearisoa represented Madagascar in the country’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and he has been named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in both Madagascar and France.

Photo credit: © Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

Simon Peers is internationally recognized as an expert on Malagasy textiles, having founded a workshop in Madagascar in 1994, and revived a lost tradition of silk weaving. He is well-known as the creator of the golden spider silk textiles, alongside Nicholas Godley. Over the course of eight years, they created three textiles and an embroidered cape from the silk of the golden orb-weaver spider, which have been celebrated and displayed in museums around the world.

Photo credit: Ange Peers