Ifeanyi Awachie is a writer and curator. She studied English at Yale, where she produced a multimedia novella as her senior project in the competitive Writing Concentration. She wrote, performed, and competed with Teeth Slam Poets, Yale's nationally-recognized slam poetry team, of which she was Artistic Director. She was chosen to perform her poem Let's Commence as the Ivy Ode, an annual tribute to Yale College, at the 2014 Class Day Ceremony.
A visual thinker, Ifeanyi uses photography as a means of storytelling. Determined to find images of Nigeria she sensed were missing from mainstream media, she traveled alone to the country for the first time since birth to start the multimedia project Summer in Igboland, aimed at documenting Nigeria in a nuanced way and rebranding it in a positive light. She won the Tristan Perlroth Prize for Summer Foreign Travel to support the project and has hosted multiple exhibits at Yale. In 2015, she published a book based on her experiences.
Ifeanyi continues to write poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; teaches spoken word in high schools and elsewhere as Coordinator of The Word New Haven; curates Literary Happy Hour, a reading and performance series for diverse local writers; curates AFRICA SALON, Yale's contemporary African arts and culture festival, which she created as part of her work at the Yale Africa Initiative; and staffs documentary photography project I Love New Haven. She is based in New Haven, CT.
Source: Ifeanyi Awachie dot com
Comments