Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and was awarded Financial Times' Women of the Year, 2016, alongside the Future Generation Art Prize 2017 Shortlist. She is the recipient of the African Art Award, 2019, Prix Canson Prize, 2016, Foreign Policy's Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015, the Next Generation Prize, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015, the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, 2015, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize, 2014. Recent selected solo exhibitions include: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, curated by Hilton Als, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, USA; travelling to The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California (2020);"The Beautyful Ones", Victoria Miro Venice, Venice, Italy (2019); "The Beautyful Ones", National Portrait Gallery, London, UK (2018–2019); Front Room: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Baltimore Museum of Art (2018) alongside Prospect.4, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans, Louisiana (2018); Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Predecessors, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, which toured to Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2017); Portals, Victoria Miro, London (2016), I Refuse to be Invisible, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016) and The Beautyful Ones, Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2015), staged concurrently with a solo presentation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Interiorities at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020); I am... Contemporary Women Artists of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, USA; Radical Revisionists: Contemporary African Artists Confronting Past and Present, Moody Centre for the Arts, Houston, Texas, USA (2020); The Power Of My Hands, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, France (2020); May You Live In Interesting Times, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Ralph Rugoff (2019); Rock My Soul (Curated by Isaac Julien), Victoria Miro Gallery, London, UK (2019); There I Belong. Hammershøi by Elmgreen & Dragset, SMK, Copenhagen, (2019). Additionally, Akunyili Crosby has exhibited at institutional venues including; MCA Chicago, Chicago, USA (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London, UK (2018 & 2020); The Metropolitan Museum, NY, USA (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016 & 2019); the New Museum, New York (2015); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014); Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2014); Landcommandery of Alden-Biesen, Bilzen, Belgium (2014); BRIC, New York (2013); Bronx Museum, New York (2013); and the Museum of New Art Detroit (2012). Her work is in the collections of major museums including Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Tate, The Norton Museum of Art, Zeitz MOCAA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.