Nana Oforiatta Ayim

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. She is the founder and director of the cultural research organisation, ANO, in Ghana. After writing extensively on contemporary African arts and creating numerous research and exhibition projects internationally, she established ANO as a permanent centre in Ghana in 2012 In 2016, she created the online version of the pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, “a large-scale documentation and archive project, dedicated to the re/ordering of knowledge, narratives and representations from and about the African continent”.

She became a filmmaker after working with economist Thi Minh Ngo and filmmaker Chris Marker on a new translation of his 1954 film Les Statues Meurent Aussi. Her films, which often have cultural themes, are a cross of fiction, travel essay, and documentary.

She is the recipient of the 2015 Art & Technology Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and of the 2016 AIR Award, which honours and celebrates “extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”.

Oforiatta Ayim was named by The Africa Report as one of 50 African Trailblazers and by Okayafrica as one of 12 African women making history. Her first novel, The God Child, a story of personal and national identity and described as ‘a debut novel by one of the most exciting African literary voices to emerge in recent years’ was published in November 2019 by Bloomsbury.