Board of Trustees

Chika Okeke-Agulu

Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies; Director, Program in African Studies and Director, Africa World Initiative, Princeton University, USA

An artist, critic, and art historian, Okeke-Agulu specializes in indigenous, modern, and contemporary African and African Diaspora art history and theory. Born in Umuahia, Nigeria, Okeke-Agulu earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Nigeria in 1994 and a PhD in Art History from Emory University in 2004. He previously taught at The Pennsylvania State University (2004-2013) and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (1995-2000). At Princeton, he is also the Director of the Africa World Initiative.

Okeke-Agulu has held prestigious visiting professorships at Williams College (2007), New York University (2020), and the University of Oxford (2023). He has been recognized as a Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2008) and received the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship (2010). In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of The British Academy.

His publications include several influential books on African art, such El Anatsui. The Reinvention of Sculpture (Damiani, 2022), African Artists: From 1882 to Now (Phaidon, 2021), Yusuf Grillo: Painting. Lagos. Life (Skira, 2020), Obiora Udechukwu: Line, Image, Text (Skira, 2016), Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Duke UP, 2015), and Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Damiani, 2010). He has also contributed to numerous academic journals and mainstream media outlets, and co-edits Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.As a curator, Okeke-Agulu has co-organized significant exhibitions, including Samuel Fosso: Affirmative Acts at Princeton University Art Museum in 2022 and, with Okwui Enwezor, the traveling survey El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019). He serves on advisory boards for several prominent art institutions and has received multiple awards for his contributions to art history and criticism.