Ashara Ekundayo

Ashara Ekundayo has a creative practice rooted in joy-informed pedagogies and the study, creation and exhibition of Black archives, site-responsive ceremony and artist-based strategies such as screenprinting, photography, zine-making and altar-ritual. She explores cultural identity, memory, liberation, and place and space through spellcasting, spirituality, architecture, and history as an independent curator, archivist, arts administrator, and visual maker.

She is the founder and a member of the Artist As First Responder collective located in Oakland CA and Detroit MI centering the work of artists whose practices heal communities and save lives. Additionally she is a former gallerist at Omi Gallery at Impact Hub Oakland and Ashara Ekundayo Gallery who has collaborated with international cultural institutions and worked with artists such as Zanele Muholi, Alisha B. Wormsely, Lava Thomas, and Sabrina Nelson to name a few. She has held residencies and advisory board positions with entities such as the U.S. Dept. of State Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs, Villa Albertine, Headlands Center for the Arts, SECA at San Francisco MoMA and the Black Art Library, and co-founded both Black [Space] Residency and The Black Curator’s Lab.

Currently Ashara is stewarding a series of immersive tech networked activations via the AfroPortals Project Space and developing a center for the study of radical Black archives.

You Can Connect With Ashara Here:

Instagram