Welcome to Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, who joins Robinson College as our newest Fellow this term.

Iheanyi Onwuegbucha is an art historian and independent curator specialising in the art of Africa and its diaspora. He will be joining the Faculty of History of Art, as a Professor in African and Caribbean Modern and Contemporary Art from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where he is completing a doctoral dissertation on the Nsukka School. At Princeton, he was also co-investigator of Museumverse, a Humanities Council–funded project that connects art and cultural institutions with emerging digital and virtual technologies.

He holds an M.A. in Art History, Criticism and Conservation from Princeton University; an M.A. in Art Gallery and Museum Studies from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, where he was a 2016 Chevening Scholar; and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He was also a Predoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

As an independent curator, he served as Curator and Acting Artistic Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. He was guest curator for the inaugural exhibitions of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, and consulting art curator for the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, Lagos. He has co-curated exhibitions in Germany, France and the United States, including Samuel Fosso: Affirmative Acts at the Princeton University Art Museum (with Chika Okeke-Agulu and others); Samuel Fosso: The Man with a Thousand Faces at The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm (with Clothilde Morette and Clara Stratmann); and Diaspora at Home at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, and Kadist, Paris (with Sophie Potelon).

He is currently working on several research projects, including a multi-year study of the Aka Circle of Exhibiting Artists, which has resulted in a major exhibition and a forthcoming book, Kindred Spirits: The Aka Circle of Artists, to be published by Skira Editore, Milan (Summer 2026). His research and writings have appeared in African Arts and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, La Belle Revue and Foam Magazine.

Recent Publications

Forthcoming: Kindred Spirits: The Aka Circle of Artists (Skira Editore, 2026)

“Worldmaking from the Margins: Black Figuration and Pan-Africanism in Two Recent Exhibitions in the United States,” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 57 (November, 2025) 32 – 45.
"Translational Acts: Sculpture in the Nsukka School," African Arts vol. 58. no. 2. (Spring 2025) 40 – 52.
“Object Biography: Tracing the Life of El Anatsui's Metamorphic Sculptures,” in El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta, Ed. Tessa Giblin and Melissa MacRobert (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)