"My work is an act of reclamation and remembrance, restoring conversations around heritage, power, and possibility."
- Chelsea Odufu
Chelsea Odufu is a Nigerian-Guyanese-American multidisciplinary artist, photographer, filmmaker, and Afro-futurist world-builder whose practice spans photography, film, installation, and sculpture. Working between Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa, and the United States, she creates immersive visual narratives that explore memory, spirituality, migration, identity, and the possibilities of future worlds.
A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Odufu developed her cinematic practice while working alongside Spike Lee, before expanding her work into contemporary art, installation, and experimental moving-image practices.
Drawing from African cosmologies, diasporic histories, and speculative imagination, Odufu develops bodies of work that move fluidly between the ancestral and the futuristic. Her research-driven practice investigates the cultural fragments, rituals, symbols, and narratives that persist across time and geography, transforming them into portals through which new stories can emerge.
Her work has been showcased internationally at major exhibitions and festival including Dak'Art 2022 and 2024, Burning Man (2023), Africa Foto Fair in Côte d'Ivoire(2024), Photo London (2024), Paris Photo (2023), The Shed in New York, Christie's London, the Guatemala Biennale, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Recent exhibitions include The Wake at Dak'Art 2024, Imagining Black Diasporas at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (2025), Portal's Exhibition at The Shed (2025), and Spaces & Places at Fred Pointone Gallery in Tribeca, New York (2025). She has also participated in artist residencies including Black Rock Senegal, Fresh Milk Barbados, and will undertake an upcoming residency at the G.A.S. Foundation in Nigeria. Her films have also been screened by the British Film Institute(BFI).
Her work is held in private and corporate collections, including J.P. Morgan Chase.
Through photographs, films, sculptures, and immersive installations, Chelsea Odufu creates spaces where history, mythology, and speculation converge, inviting viewers to imagine alternative futures rooted in African knowledge systems, diasporic memory, and collective narratives.