Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She was awarded a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship and 2017 MacArthur Fellowship. Akunyili Crosby is the recipient of the 2020 Carnegie Corporation “Great Immigrant, Great American” Award; the 2019 African Art Award; the 2017 Future Generation Art Prize Shortlist; the 2016 Prix Canson Prize; the 2015 Foreign Policy’s Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015 Prize; the 2015 Next Generation Prize, New Museum of Contemporary Art; the 2015 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize,
and the 2014 Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize. She was named one of the Financial Times’ Women of the Year in 2016.
Akunyili Crosby’s work is in the collections of major museums including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, The Norton Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Tate, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and Zeitz MOCAA.
