Adama Delphine Fawundu
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photo-based artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Fawundu is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Fine Art and Photography at Columbia University, Bloomfield College and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Netherlands. She is a co-author of the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. Fawundu’s most recent publication is a hand bound quarterly limited edition journal of 100, titled, hala: an unexpected gift.
Fawundu is interested in decolonization of the mind, and imagining new ways of being in the world. She often questions the possibilities of freedom within the confines of social hierarchies. Fawundu draws inspiration from the ethnographies of her family’s lineage, the Mende, Bubi, Krim and Bamileke of West Africa. Her research interests include African spirituality, global indigenous ontologies, and the layered and hidden histories of people within the African Diaspora. Understanding the history of photography and the documentary film as colonial tools, Fawundu often disrupts the norms of these mediums to create new trans-historical identities as she explores Afro-futurist ideas.
Her most recent group exhibitions were on view at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany), Manarat Al Saadiyat and Sole (Abu Dhabi), The California African American Museum, University of San Diego, The Moody Center for Arts (Rice University) and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT). She was commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory and New York University to participate in the 100 Years 100 Women exhibition commemorating one century since the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Solo presentations of her work were recently on view at The Miller Theater at Columbia University, Hesse Flatow Gallery (Chelsea), Granary Arts (Utah), Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, and The African American Museum in Philadelphia. She has participated in artist residencies at BRIC Workspace, The Center for Book Arts, the Penumbra Foundation and the African Artist Foundation (Nigeria). Ms. Fawundu was awarded grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, and The Open Society Institute. Her works can be found in the the collections at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Norton Museum of Art, The David C. Driskell Center (University of Maryland), The Petrucci Family Foundation and The Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Fawundu’s works have been published in anthologies such as: Contact High: A Visual History of Hip Hop by Vikki Tobak, Africa Under the Prism: Contemporary African Photography from the Lagos Photo Festival by Joseph Gergel, ReSignifications: European Blackamoors, Africana Readings, edited by Awam Ampka, Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840-Present by Dr. Deborah Willis. Her works have also been featured in publications such as Vogue, Surface Magazine, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The BBC and New York Magazine.
— From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records
