BIOS & IMAGES

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne | Photo credit: Casey Horsfield

Full Bio (200 words)

Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha (b. 1989, Italy) creates work that questions and exposes the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation, and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the seeming absences that define systems of labor, ecology and relations.

Ọnụọha's recent solo exhibitions include bitforms gallery (USA) and Forest City Gallery (Canada). Her work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of Art (USA), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (AUS), Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (China), La Gaitê Lyrique (France), Transmediale Festival (Germany), The Photographers Gallery (UK), and NEON (Greece) among others. Her public art engagements have been supported by Akademie der Kunst (Germany), Le Centre Pompidou (France) the Royal College of Art (UK), the Rockefeller Foundation (USA), and Princeton University (USA).

Ọnụọha earned her MPS from NYU Tisch's Interactice Telecommunications Program, where she has taught as an Assistant Professor. She is a Creative Capital and Fulbright-National Geographic grantee. She is also the Co-founder of A People's Guide To Tech, an artist-led organization that makes educational guides and workshops about emerging technology.

Topics of Interest

Data collection; narratives and realities of emerging technology; power relations and entanglements. Liberation.

The ways that algorithmic, structural, and ecological forms of violence overlap with and affect one another.

The false divide between the natural and technological worlds.

Post-coloniality, and what comes after post-coloniality. Blackness, Black Thought as resistant, radical site of sense-making.

Movement, and the hierarchies that affect it. Indigeneity, and the different ways of considering it.

Short Bio (50 words)

Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha's work deploys choice moments of seeming absence to question and expose the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation, and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the gaps that define systems of labor, ecology and relations.

Medium Bio (130 words)

Ọnụọha's recent solo exhibitions include bitforms gallery (USA) and Forest City Gallery (Canada). Her work has been featured at the Gropius Bau (Germany), the Whitney Museum of Art (USA), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (AUS), Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (China), La Gaitê Lyrique (France), Transmediale Festival (Germany), The Photographers Gallery (UK), and NEON (Greece) among others. Her public art engagements have been supported by Akademie der Kunst (Germany), the Royal College of Art (UK), the Rockefeller Foundation (USA), and Princeton University (USA).

Organizational Bio

Mimi Onuoha has worked as a pioneering artist, educator, and researcher within the fields of tech advocacy and data-driven criticism for close to a decade. As an artist, her projects frequently involve working with teams of community members to make datasets and investigate complex technical realities in ways that are engaging and surprising, with a focus on the ways that the treatment of marginalized groups reveal the logics of dominant structures. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in places as varied as La Gaitê Lyrique (France), FIBER Festival (Netherlands), Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (China), Le Centre Pompidou (France), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (USA), the Carnegie Museum of Art (USA), The Photographer’s Gallery (UK), and Arthouse Foundation (Nigeria, upcoming). In 2014 she was selected to be in the inaugural class of Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows, in 2018-19 she served as the inaugural Creative-in-Residence at Olin College of Engineering, and she has served as a jury for art prizes and residencies like the Interaction Design Awards, Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, and Mozilla Foundation (upcoming). Her work has been covered in publications like the New York Times, HyperAllergic, WIRED, VICE, AIGA, the New York Times Magazine, Fast Forward, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She is on the Brooklyn Public Library’s Arts & Letters Committee.

Onuoha is a seasoned educator and writer. She has taught in libraries and community groups, as well as in graduate and undergraduate departments at Bennington College, New York University, and Olin College for Engineering on subjects ranging from creative programming to tech policy and art creation. As a writer, her articles have appeared in publications like Columbia University’s Tow Center, National Geographic, Quartz, FiveThirtyEight, K Verlag Press, and MIT Press (upcoming) and she has been in residence at NYU, the Royal College of Art, Data & Society Research Institute, Studio XX (Montreal), Pioneer Works, and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.

Mimi’s artistic contributions to the tech field open new perspectives of thinking about what is believed to be possible. She works across different fields and disciplines to create projects that use technology in concrete ways to highlight different ways of considering the world that always bring more power to those who lack it.