The Prince Claus Fund was established in 1996, named in honour of Prince Claus of the Netherlands.
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, Mutu now splits her time between her studio there in Nairobi and her studio in Brooklyn, New York, where she has lived and worked for over 20 years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.
Amy Arbus is an American photographer. She teaches portraiture at the International Center of Photography, Anderson Ranch, NORD photography and the Fine Arts Work Center. She has published several books of photography, including The Fourth Wall which The New Yorker called her "masterpiece". Her work has appeared in over 100 periodicals including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Architectural Digest, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the daughter of actor Allan Arbus and photographer Diane Arbus, the sister of writer and journalist Doon Arbus, and the niece of distinguished poet Howard Nemerov.
Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.
Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.
The cinema of Kenya refers to the film industry of Kenya. Although a very small industry by western comparison, Kenya has produced or been a location for film since the early 1950s when Men Against the Sun was filmed in 1952. Although, in the United States, jungle epics that were set in the country were shot in Hollywood as early as the 1940s.
Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri is an Indian artist, film director, and photographer.
Nairobi Half Life is a 2012 Kenyan drama film directed by David "Tosh" Gitonga. The film was selected as the Kenyan entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, but did not make the final shortlist. It is the first time Kenya has submitted a film in this category.
Sunara Begum is an English visual and performance artist, filmmaker, photographer and writer of Bangladeshi descent. She uses installation, film, photography, live performance, sonics and text. Begum is the founder and director of Chand Aftara, a creation centre. Begum is also the co-founder of Living Legacies, a traditional music archive in Gambia and New Horizons Africa, a music and arts festival in Lagos, Nigeria.
Jim Chuchu is a Kenyan film director, photographer, singer-songwriter and visual artist. He first came to attention as a member of Kenyan music group Just a Band and subsequently as director of Kenyan LGBT film Stories of Our Lives.
Robert Farber is an American photographer and lecturer known for his work with nudes, fashion, landscapes and still lives. He has published eleven books of original collections that have sold over half-a-million copies, four of them revised into later editions. He continues to exhibit classic and new work worldwide.
Syowia Kyambi is a multimedia and interdisciplinary artist and curator whose work spans photography, video, drawing, sound, sculpture, and performance installation. She is of Kenyan and German descent, based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is known for her "performative installations that recast historical (Western) narratives and intervene in spheres of colonial activities" with work reputed for tackling "complex and sometimes difficult or tabooed matters" that afford "multiple points of entry, grounded in a sense of place and history while recognizing the mutability of those concepts." Through focusing on historical past, she also draws the audience's attention to daily life through her artwork.
Kenya (Robinson) (born 1977) is an American multimedia artist whose work includes performance, sculpture and installation. Raised in Gainesville, Florida, (Robinson)'s work depicts themes of privilege and consumerism, exploring perceptions of gender, race and ability. Combining a variety of audio-visual elements and live performance, (Robinson)'s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and the 60 Wall Street Gallery of Deutsche Bank. She has lectured at Hampshire College, Long Island University, and the University of Florida.
Judy Kibinge is a Kenyan filmmaker, writer and producer. She has produced, written and directed a number of films, best known are Something Necessary (2013), Dangerous Affair (2002), and Project Daddy (2004). She is also known for establishing Docubox, a documentary film fund for African filmmakers to help them produce and distribute their film. She released her first film, The Aftermath, in 2002 and critics have said that she uses her films to impart stories about Kenya, particularly those about women and others that are typically not told in mainstream Hollywood.
Sarah Bahbah is an Arab-Australian artist of Palestinian and Jordanian descent. She was born and raised in Perth, but moved to Los Angeles, California at 25. She gained international attention in 2015 with her photographic series "Sex and Takeout", a play on food porn and indulgence without restraint. She held her first solo exhibition, Fuck Me, Fuck You, in New York City in 2018. She has worked with several prominent brands, models, and artists, including Gucci and Vogue. In 2019, she became the first Arab to shoot a cover for GQ Middle East.
Osborne Macharia is a self-taught Kenyan commercial photographer and digital artist whose work focuses on themes of Afrofuturism in culture, identity, and fictional narratives. He has been called "a master at creating alternate black universes."
Nydia Blas is an American photographer from the state of New York, whose works explore the identity of young Black women and girls. Her concern at the lack of Black women represented in the visual arts has led her to concentrate solely on making images of women of color. She is currently an assistant professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches photography in the department of art and visual culture.
Mimi Cherono Ng'ok is a Kenyan photographer, living in Nairobi. Her "photographs are a visual diary of the experiences and emotions emerging from her itinerant life". Ng'ok's work has been shown at the Hayward Gallery, Berlin Biennale, Carnegie International and African Photography Encounters, and is held in the Walther Collection.
Cyrus Kabiru is a Kenyan visual artist, who is self taught. He is known for his sculptural eyewear made of found objects, and is part of the Afrofuturism cultural movement.
