Kosisochukwu Nnebe (b. 1993, Nigeria) is a neurodivergent Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, researcher, and writer. Her practice draws on and critically interrogates her academic training in economics and development, as well as her professional experience in social, economic, and environmental policy within the Canadian government. These experiences inform her focus on anti-imperial worldbuilding through acts of solidarity—human and otherwise—and speculative reimaginings of pasts, presents, and futures.
The works open onto the everyday—foodways, nail salons, native languages—as sites through which memory, knowledge, and power are embedded and quietly circulate. From these vernacular forms and infrastructures, Nnebe constructs counter-archives that trace how the wounds and logics of imperialism have been, and might yet be, subverted and repurposed toward new ends. What emerges are transgressive understandings of Blackness rooted in anti-imperial relationality.
Plants become vectors for connection and knowledge transmission between differently colonized peoples, sidelining the colonizer. Beauty and adornment are imbued with spiritual and moral meaning and figure in gendered modes of dissent that transform feminized labour and aesthetics into tools of resistance. Existing channels for the circulation of capital - both within and outside the arts - become the means for the redistribution of resources as a form of mutual aid and reparations.
Through structured spatial encounters and coded visual forms, Nnebe’s installations foreground the viewer’s body and position in space—not as detached observer, but as complicit, entangled, and crashing into the very systems the work exposes. In a reversal of power, the works impose their own conditions for comprehensibility: Black women’s labour, knowledge, and emotional lives (from grief to rage to love to pleasure) emerge not as subjects to be deciphered, but as the epistemic ground through which meaning itself becomes possible.
TL;DR : Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, researcher, and writer. Nnebe’s practice mobilizes vernacular forms and everyday infrastructures—foodways, nail salons, native languages—to construct counter-archives of Blackness rooted in anti-imperial relationality.
Cutting across installation, sculpture and lens-based media, her works engage with spatiality and coded visual lexicons to establish Black women’s emotional lives, labour, and knowledge not as subjects to be deciphered but as the epistemic ground through which meaning itself becomes possible.
Nnebe is the recipient of the 2026 Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Visual Arts from the Canada Council for the Arts. She is a 2025 alumna of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands; a 2023-24 Awardee of the G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA in Lagos, Nigeria; and was nominated for and selected as a 2024 Artist-in-Residence with Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) at El Espacio 23, a contemporary art space founded by Jorge M. Perez in Miami, US. In 2027, Nnebe will participate in the Burroughs Residency with the Floating Museum in Chicago, US.
Her work has been shown in exhibitions internationally, including the Vietnam Center for Contemporary Art, Rencontres Photographiques de Guyane (French Guiana), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), UNFAIR Amsterdam, the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), Josilda da Conceição (Amsterdam), the Tolhuistuin Centre (Amsterdam), NADA New York, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture (Charlotte, North Carolina), the Bowling Green State University Gallery (Bowling Green, Ohio), Green Space (Miami), Hausen Gallery (New York City), the Mohr Gallery at Stanford University (Stanford, California), the Art Museum of Toronto, Art Toronto, Critical Distance Centre for Curators (Toronto), the NIA Centre (Toronto), the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto), Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Galerie de l’Université du Québec à Montréal et a l’Outaouais (Montreal and Hull), Optica Gallery (Montreal), Centre Clark (Montreal), articule (Montreal), Plural (Montreal), the Warren G. Flowers Gallery (Montreal), the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery (Montreal), the Ottawa Art Gallery, the School for Photographic Arts (Ottawa), AXENEO7 (Hull), the Foreman Gallery at the University of Sherbrooke, Gallery Gachet (Vancouver), Artspeak (Vancouver), Richmond Gallery (Richmond, BC), Plug in ICA (Winnipeg), The Bows (Calgary), the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Robert McGlaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (Bowmanville), and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston).
Nnebe is regularly invited to give presentations about her artistic research at universities and art centres across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. She has been commissioned for public art by Plug In ICA and digital art by the Mozilla Foundation, and is the recipient of numerous grants at the national and provincial levels. Institutional acquisitions include KADIST International, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Medcan Art Collection, Projet Casa and the Montreal Roundtable for Black History Month, in addition to private collections in Canada, the United States and Nigeria.
Her work has been featured in arts and media publications internationally including: GIDA Journal (Nigeria), Guzangs (Ghana), Lagos Meet (Nigeria), Black Archives Sweden (Sweden), NO NIIN Magazine (Finland), the Garage School (Netherlands), Metropolis Magazine (Netherlands), Disembodied Territories (UK), The Guardian (UK), Contemporary And and Contemporary And Latin America (Germany/Kenya), Surface Design Journal (US), Sugarcane Magazine (US), Arts.Black (US), CBC (Canada), Canadian Art Magazine (Canada), C Magazine (Canada), the Power Plant’s In/Tension Podcast (Canada), Akimbo (Canada), Esse (Canada), Vie des Arts (Canada), the Agnes Etherington’s With Opened Mouths Podcast (Canada), Artexte (Canada), Studio Magazine (Canada), Herizons Magazine (Canada), Femme Art Review (Canada), Peripheral Review (Canada), Newest Magazine (Canada), Ornamentum Magazine (Canada) and Range Magazine (Canada).