Emmanuel Iduma

Writer, New York and Lagos

It was while studying law at university in Nigeria that Emmanuel Iduma and two of his fellow students launched a literary magazine named Saraba. Iduma continued to edit the online publication until last year. He has also edited two volumes of contemporary African writing and his own books include a novel, a collection of travel stories, and a memoir tracing the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war (to be published in 2021). Between 2011 and 2016 he worked with the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers’ Organization, writing short texts on the project and editing The Trans-African journal. His writing has appeared in publications including ARTNews, Art in America, the New York Review of Books Daily and the British Journal of Photography. In 2017 he was a co-curator of the first Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He has an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he now teaches. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol grant for arts writing (awarded for his essays about Nigerian artists) and this year won the inaugural Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism from the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics.

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