What’s your background?

I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, becoming part of the first "American" generation of my Nigerian family. Growing up surrounded by such a beautiful array of Nigerian and southern African American communities, I have always had an enriched and lived understanding of the diaspora's uniqueness, beauties, and tensions. As I grew more interested in the creative sphere of things around late high school, I became more interested in expanding my sense of self and space in and beyond this world. This interest carried on into my studies at Stanford University with a B.A. in African and African American Studies with Honors and Distinction and a minor in Art focusing on the Black Diaspora, pop culture, Blackqueerness, media, art, and aesthetics. My drive to create and envision new ways of understanding our rapidly changing world translates across all of my work.

What influences you artistically?

The everyday moments, points of mundanity, and the situations that shaped my nuanced emotions throughout the many different stages of my life serve as an endless well of inspiration for me to pull from and connect my ideas and art to the feelings (or at least the memory of the feeling in action). Music videos and their rhythmic editing style are a primary reason I make films the way I do. This interplay of visual and sound across the Black Diaspora and the aesthetic continuums continues to shape the cultural terrains that truly reflect a unique understanding of elements of life. I find so much love and appreciation for the many interconnected life journeys that make up the Black Diaspora as we have known it, are creating, and hope to embody one day. The experimental nature of Blackqueerness reflected in life, art, and research has always been a point of influence for me. Finding Blackqueerness in the liminal interpretation, reappropriation, remix, and distortion of visuals, sounds, and various forms of media influences my unique self-curation of aesthetic values.

How do you start a new work?

I start new work with a very intentional presence of myself in the ideation stage. What is on my mind? What are the pressing and lingering thoughts, curiosities, feelings, awe, and worry? What are some notes of mine that I feel an urge to dive further into now? I love allowing my imagination and memories to wander and focus on aspects that spark greater intrigue and alignment. Art is a form of communication, so I fully articulate my ideas to myself and others in their depths and complexities. I always begin new work with research in its many forms. From visual, sonic, textual, media, and archival research,  I always enjoy connecting my work expansively within the boundless possibilities of art and how it has and continues to be created and shared. Learning more about myself, culture, and humanity feels like a self-study process. It feels nice to reinterpret material through my unique perspective and evolving aesthetic taste, which seeps into my refinement process of developing a concept for artistic experimentation across mediums, whether separate or intertwined.

What are you working on right now?

I am working on continuing to build the world around my creative practices, as I am actively evolving the foundation for my aesthetic sensibilities across mediums. I feel like I’m at a point of introduction to myself and others in many ways. Yet, I feel very assured in my expansive sense of understanding and experiencing the multiplicities of life, while allowing it to morph my art. a_blurred_fluxx_00.avi (2024), jamaica_all in awe.avi (2024), and my audiovisual projects since 2022 are a body of work I want to continue expanding the ways to interact with, reflect on, and in a way, shape memories around. Being in endless research and experimentation has been beautiful, as I am being inspired and enriched creatively. I aim to share my frameworks around the arts, my nuanced thoughts around culture, identity, expression, the social, and how geography shapes so much of that, especially in an age of internet-driven cultural hybridity and hyper-media consumption. Overall, continuing to cultivate my love for the present, the study and feeling of the past, the boundless imaginings of the future, and the blurring of space and time through and beyond the arts.