Adama Delphine Fawundu
Adama Delphine Fawundu is photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa.
“Adama Delphine Fawundu’s work is about finding ways to connect with her kin – a group not merely confined to those who
share a direct common ancestor but an expansive definition inclusive of the many who descend from the dispersed, the stolen, those for whom the violence, and opportunity wrought by the sea is at once a spectre and a fact of everyday life,” writes scholar Niama Safia Sandy.
With over fifteen years experience working as a photographer, Fawundu enhance her studio practice and completed her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2018. She now uses photography, printmaking, video, sound and assemblage as an artistic language.
Fawundu co-founded and independently published the sold-out book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. The critically acclaimed book MFON led Fawundu on a book tour which included talks at The Tate Modern, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harvard University amongst many other institutions. The book is in numerous libraries around the world including, The Victoria & Albert Museum, Columbia University, The International Center of Photography, and Harvard University.
In recognition of her artistic practice, Ms. Fawundu was nominated for and won the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, named OkayAfrica’s 100 Women making an impact on Africa and its Diaspora and included in the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) Hundred Heroines, in 2018. Ms. Fawundu’s awards also include, New York Foundation of the Arts Photography Fellow, Brooklyn Art Council Grant, Open Society Foundation Community Fellow, the Brooklyn Historical Society Community Initiative Grant, BRIC Workspace Artist-in-Residence and she is currently an artist-in-residence at the Center for Book Arts.
Ms. Fawundu has exhibited internationally, with two solo shows in 2019 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and Crush Curatorial gallery in Chelsea, NYC.
Ms. Fawundu’s works have been reviewed in publications and media outlets such as Time Magazine, The New York Times, Surface Magazine, Leica Fotografie International, Vogue Online, The Washington Post, Dazed Digital, Arise TV, and the BBC World. Her works are published in anthologies such as: Africa Under the Prism: Contemporary African Photography from the Lagos Photo Festival by Joseph Gergel, ReSignifications: European Blackamoors, Africana Readings, Edited by Awam Ampka, and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840-Present by Dr. Deborah Willis.
Ms. Fawundu’s works can be found in the private and public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Norton Museum of Art, Corridor Art Gallery, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland and The Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.