Artist Bio

Nanci Amaka is a Nigerian American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and lecturer living and working in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Amaka received a BFA/BA in Visual Critical Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Her practice engages concepts surrounding memory, ancestry, mortality, and West African animism through performance, sculpture, painting, installations, video, and photography. Her work can be found in private collections globally, and has been exhibited internationally at various museums and galleries including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; International Center for Photography;  Honolulu Museum of Art’s Doris Duke Theatre; Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History; Hawai‘i State Art Museum among others.

Born in Nigeria, Amaka spent her formative years in a rural rainforest village in southeastern Nigeria, immersed in her indigenous Igbo culture. She immigrated to the continental USA as an adolescent and has lived in various cities since, eventually moving to Honolulu, Hawai‘i where she currently lives with her husband and child.

Please email nanciamaka@gmail.com to request a CV.

Artist Statement

My work lives in the space between looking, seeing and knowing.  My performances explore the concept of existing in a world with other humans; of being an object that experiences its reality in a sea of other objects simultaneously experiencing varying realities.  My visual work is of the things I can not say.  My essays are about those heavy, yet mass-less waves that bind us.  

I’m interested in the psychological and philosophical nuances of visual language; in thoughts, histories, memories, and awareness.  I’m most interested in the poetry of consciously going through time with another person.