Nanci Amaka is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages concepts surrounding memory, ancestry, mortality, animism, and West African philosophy. She investigates trauma as a way to speak of disrupted lifetimes; explores agency in imbalanced power dynamics and perceptions of autonomy in a globalized world. Through performance, sculpture, painting, installation, video, and photography, Amaka’s work tugs at the thread binding a single lived diasporic human experience to collective memory.
Born in Nigeria, Amaka spent her formative years in a rural rainforest village in southeastern Nigeria, immersed in her indigenous Igbo culture. She often references this experience of coming into awareness in a world on the threshold of centuries of indigenous ritual and oral history. 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.
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 work can be found in private collections globally and has been exhibited internationally at various museums and galleries. Recent and notable exhibitions include Hawaiʻi Triennial 2025; 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 x Mori; and Honolulu Museum of Art School.
