Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby studied at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Yale University. The recorded working language is English and Igbo. Residence is recorded at Los Angeles and Enugu. Positions recorded include artist-in-residence. Work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby is recorded in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Studio Museum in Harlem. Distinctions recorded are MacArthur Fellows Program.

Njideka Akunyili was born in 1983 and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. She is of Igbo descent and grew up bilingual in Igbo and English. One of six siblings, Akunyili Crosby's father, Chike Akunyili, was a surgeon and her mother, Dora Akunyili, was a professor of pharmacology at the University of Nigeria, and the former director of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration. Akunyili Crosby moved to Lagos when she was thirteen years old to attend the secondary school Queen's College (QC) Yaba, Lagos. Her mother won the U.S. green card lottery for the family, enabling Akunyili Crosby and her siblings to move to the United States and to get financial aid to study there. In 1999, at the age of 16, she left Nigeria with her sister, Ijeoma (Ije Akunyili), and moved to the United States. She spent a gap year studying for her SAT's and taking American history, science, and calculus classes before returning to Nigeria to serve a year of National Service. After she completed her service, she returned to the United States to study in Philadelphia. She took her first oil painting class at the Community College of Philadelphia where her teacher Jeff Reed encouraged her to apply to Swarthmore College. She graduated Swarthmore College in 2004, where she studied art and biology as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She was at first getting pre-medical requirements to pursue a career in medicine before deciding to pursue art. She didn't pursue art until her senior year at Swarthmore after realizing she enjoyed her art classes more than her Organic Chemistry and Advanced Biology classes. She felt the urgency to tell her experience as a Nigerian in the diaspora through her art. After graduating from Swarthmore in 2004, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This is where she earned a post-baccalaureate certificate in 2006. She later attended the Yale University School of Art, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.

After graduating from Yale in 2011, Akunyili Crosby was selected as artist-in-residence at the highly regarded Studio Museum in Harlem, known for promoting and supporting emerging African artists. During this residency she met her mentor, New-York based artist, Wangechi Mutu. She spent her year of residence experimenting with drawing, figure painting, studying contemporary art, postcolonial history and diasporic studies. In 2015, Jamillah James, a former Studio Museum in Harlem curator and at the same time, assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, organized Akunyili Crosby's first solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum. That same year, James organized another exhibition of Akunyili Crosby's work at Art and Practice in Los Angeles. In 2016, Akunyili Crosby was named one of the Financial Times Women of the Year." That same year, a solo exhibition of Akunyili Crosby's work was held at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. In 2017, Akunyili Crosby won the MacArthur Fellowship Genius grant. In 2018, Akunyili Crosby designed the mural that wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. The mural features her signature style of combining painting with collage, printmaking, and drawing to create intricate, layered scenes. She was the second artist to create a mural for the site under a new initiative by the museum. “Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…)” (2021) was commissioned for the Met's exhibition, Before Yesterday We Could Fly. Akunyili Crosby's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Her work was also featured in the National Portrait Gallery's 2023 Kinship exhibit alongside fellow artists Ruth Leonela Buentello, Jess T. Dugan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jessica Todd Harper, Thomas Holton, Sedrick Huckaby, and Anna Tsouhlarakis. In 2023, the Huntington displayed The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby; an exhibit curated by New Yorker magazine critic Hilton Als. In April 2026, Crosby was announced as one of the artists commissioned by the Obama Foundation to produce a site-specific work for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, scheduled to open on 19 June 2026. The work includes a portrait of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and will be displayed in the museum’s main lobby.

Akunyili Crosby is married to Justin Crosby, who is also an artist. She has formed friendships and traded work with other artists such as Wangechi Mutu and Kehinde Wiley.

Akunyili Crosby has staged a large number of solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States and internationally. Her notable solo shows include I Still Face You (2013), Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis; Hammer Projects: Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015-2016), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Predecessors (2017), originating at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Njideka Akunyili Crosby I Counterparts (2018-2019), originating at the Baltimore Museum of Art; and Njideka Akunyili Crosby: “The Beautyful Ones” (2018), National Portrait Gallery, London. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including The Grand Balcony (2016), La Biennale de Montreal; A Good Neighbour (2017), Istanbul Biennial; Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp (2017), Prospect New Orleans; and May You Live in Interesting Times (2019), 58th Venice Biennale.

Akunyili Crosby has been represented by Victoria Miro in London since 2014 and by David Zwirner (since 2018). By 2016, demand for Akunyili Crosby’s work, which she produces slowly, far outweighed supply, prompting her prices to soar at auction. She became one of the artists featured in Nathaniel Kahn's 2018 documentary The Price of Everything where she discusses her career and attitude to her art market. It culminated with her painting Drown being sold at Sotheby's contemporary art auction in November 2016 for $900,000. Her first painting to come to market was Untitled which sold for $93,000 in September 2016 at Sotheby's New York. In March 2017, a work by Akunyili Crosby titled The Beautyful Ones (Series #1c), the first painting of five belonging to The Beautyful Ones Series, was sold by a private collector for $3 million at Christie's London. In May 2018, Akunyili Crosby set a new personal auction record with the sale of her painting Bush Babies for nearly $3.4 million at Sotheby's New York.