Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is an art historian, curator, artist, and cultural entrepreneur whose research focuses on African and African Diaspora arts, modern and contemporary art, cultural informatics, and African cultural patrimony. Ogbechie is the author of the Herskovits Award winning book Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (2008), and Making History: African Collectors and the Canon of African Art (2011). He is the founder/editor of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, and editor of Artists of Nigeria (2012).

Ogbechie has been awarded many fellowships for his work, including Daimler Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, Fellow and Consortium Professor of the Getty Research Institute, Senior Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution, and Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation and The Institute for International Education. He organized the first conference in the USA to explore the Nigerian Video Film Industry (International Nollywood Convention and Symposium, Los Angeles, 2005) and received the inaugural Teshome H. Gabriel Distinguished Africanist Award (2014) for his work on Nollywood and new African cinema. He is a noted commentator on African cultural patrimony.