Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria, and didn’t leave her small homogeneous town until moving to the metropolis of Lagos in 1993. Crosby grew up in a Nigeria that was acculturated to and independent from British colonial rule. At age sixteen, her family won the US green card lottery, and she immigrated to the United States for undergraduate studies. She earned a BFA from Swarthmore College in 2004 and an MFA from Yale University in 2011. After fifteen years in various East Coast cities, she moved to Los Angeles, where she currently resides.

Living in different countries and cities has proved formative to her work. She uses her transcultural experience as a Nigerian (bicoastal) American, underpinned by art historical and literary influences, to reflect the multilocal, multicultural nature of both contemporary African cities and US immigrant life. Crosby’s work interweaves painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage (fabric and photo) on paper. She transfers snapshots of and collages fabrics from contemporary Nigerian life into painted, loosely autobiographical scenes, contrasting her childhood in Nigeria with her adult life in America with her white American husband, and so on. The photos she uses evince the vestiges of British presence in Nigeria and/or the recent permeation of American popular culture in Nigeria. Similarly, the African fabrics carry a complicated history of colonial commerce.

She has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Crosby is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and was honored as one of the Financial Times’ 2016 Women of the Year.