Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Lives and works in New York City
Oroma Elewa is an award-winning creative director, multidisciplinary artist and founder whose practice engages lived experience, embodiment, and curiosity as critical sites of inquiry and expression. Working across photography, film, sound, sculpture, performance, and site-specific installation, she explores the sociocultural systems that shape identity, visibility, memory, and perception.
Her work is grounded in the lived realities of Black African womanhood and informed by the complexities of existing within transnational and polycultural spaces. Through an embodied and research-driven approach, she examines the tensions between interiority and public legibility, considering how identity is lived, performed, perceived, and negotiated across shifting social and cultural landscapes. Her practice engages questions surrounding cosmopolitanism, migration, desire, labor, gender, and the multiplicities of African and diasporic identity in contemporary society.
Using her own body, mind, and lived realities as both subject and conceptual site, Elewa investigates how inherited systems, cultural ideologies, and sociopolitical structures shape human experience. Her work often moves fluidly between intimacy, humor, performance, sentiment, and critique, creating spaces that challenge normative readings of African womanhood while foregrounding complexity, contradiction, and agency.
Her multidisciplinary practice spans photographic prints, film, site-specific installation, objects, often integrating performative and narrative elements to examine contemporary cultural conditions.
She has exhibited internationally, including at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and is the recipient of the 2022 Tosetti Value Award for Photography.