Jenn Nkiru (b. Peckham, London, 1987) is an award-winning visionary artist and director. Her works are grounded in the history of Black music, experimental film aesthetics, the Black arts movement, and the rich tradition of Black diaspora cinema. Pushed through her Afro-surrealist lens, past, present, and future are rethought and reordered, creating something soulful and mind-bendingly visceral. Jenn Nkiru was selected for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In 2020, she was corecipient of the Jarman Award. In 2021, she won the Grammy for Best Music Video for Beyonce’s Brown Skin Girl. It also received a CICLOPE Award, Soul Train Music Award, NAACP Image Award, and Cannes Lion. Her video installation Out/Side of Time,commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, opened in 2021, as part of the museum’s exhibition Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. Nkiru has collaborated with Kamasi Washington to create several short films, and with Lauryn Hill, for whom she was the visual director for The Fugees 2023 reunion tour. The Vinyl Factory first collaborated with Nkiru to stage her acclaimed video work Rebirth is Necessary which showed at 180 Studios as part of the exhibition Transformer in 2018.
Related events
Please note: this archive is an ongoing body of work. Sometimes the credit information (director, year etc) isn’t available so these fields may be left blank; we are progressively filling these in with further research.