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Photo: Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara

Daimler Fellow - Class of Fall 2007


Sylvester Ogbechie has an extensive scholarly background in classical, modern, and contemporary African and African Diaspora arts. His research evaluates “alternative modernities”, and the colonial and postcolonial conventions of representation in the arts and visual cultures of African and African Diaspora populations. His articles and reviews have appeared in African Arts, Arts Journal, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Revue Noire, Ijele, Farafina, and several important art history anthologies. A curator and consultant for many premier international exhibitions of modern and contemporary African art, Ogbechie has also published extensively in art exhibition catalogs, lectured at major American and international venues, and has been cited by the Smithsonian Institution, and by the city of Philadelphia for his contributions to the 2004 Philadelphia Echoes of Africa cultural program. Ogbechie is the founder and director of Aachron Knowledge Systems, which includes the publishing imprint Aachron Editions and Critical Interventions, a journal of African art theory and criticism. Ogbechie organized and coordinated the First International Nollywood Convention and Symposium (Los Angeles, June 2005) that evaluated new media in contemporary African visual culture from the perspective of the internationally acclaimed Nigerian Video Film Industry. He serves as editor for NKA, African Arts Ijele, and the principal journals of contemporary African arts and visual culture. Ogbechie holds an MA from the University of Nigeria and a PhD from Northwestern University.

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