Celebrating Ndi-Igbo

Uzo Aduba (@UzoAduba) is an American based actress of Igbo heritage. She is best known for her role as Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren in Orange Is the New Black. Uzo Aduba attended Boston University, she began earning recognition for her acting in 2003, with a performance in Translations of Xhosa at the Olney Theatre Center for the Arts. This earned her a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Play. Her Broadway debut was in 2007 as Toby in Coram Boy. She was a member of the Original Revival Cast of Godspell at the Circle in the Square Theatre from 2011 through 2012. Her first television appearance was on Blue Bloods in 2012. She also played the mother of the title character of Venice at The Public Theater in New York.

Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and filmmaker based in liminal spaces. She was born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria. Her work is often set in a landscape of disquietude, excavating the surface to reveal forces of psychosexual dislocation and violence. Brutal and surreal, it pushes past comfortable morality to honestly explore the margins of humanity. Akwaeze currently lives in Brooklyn, and has also been writing since she could write. Her works have been published by Raw Fiction and her first full length manuscript, Somadina, was selected as a finalist for the New Visions Award by Lee and Low Books.

Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze is a Brooklyn based artist of Nigerian birth 
and British upbringing. her drawings and works on paper have been influenced greatly by this cultural hybridity, as well as textile design, photography, print-making and architecture.
 amanze graduated Summa Cum Laude from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. she then went on to pursue a M.F.A at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

 Amanze has exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions in New York,
 London, Ghana, Lagos, Philadelphia, Seattle and Amsterdam. most recently, Amanze was
 awarded a 2012-13 Fulbright Scholars Award, to join the 
Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria, 
Nsukka. she currently resides in Brooklyn where she maintains a full time studio practice. Source: rubyamanze.com