Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Currently, in 2020, her work is being sold from multiple auction houses.

In 2018, Akunyili Crosby designed the mural that wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. The mural features her signature style of combining painting with collage, printmaking, and drawing to create intricate, layered scenes. She was the second artist to create a mural for the site under a new initiative by the museum.

In May 2018, Akunyili Crosby set a new auction record with the sale of her painting Bush Babies for nearly $3.4 million at Sotheby's New York.

In 2017, Akunyili Crosby won the MacArthur Fellowship Genius grant.

In March 2017, a work by Akunyili Crosby titled The Beautyful Ones (Series #1c), the first painting of five belonging to The Beautyful Ones Series, was sold by a private collector for $3 million at Christie's London.

She is married to Justin Crosby, who is also an artist. Their son, Jideora, was born in 2016. She has formed friendships and traded work with other artists such as Wangechi Mutu and Kehinde Wiley.

In 2016, Akunyili Crosby was named Financial Times Woman of the Year." That same year, a solo exhibition of Akunyili Crosby's work was held at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Akunyili Crosby has been represented by Victoria Miro Gallery since 2016 and by David Zwirner Gallery (since 2018).

By 2016, demand for Akunyili Crosby’s work, which she produces slowly, far outweighed supply, prompting her prices to soar at auction. She became one of the artists featured in Nathaniel Kahn's 2018 documentary The Price of Everything where she discusses her career and attitude to her art market. It culminated with her painting Drown being sold at Sotheby's contemporary art auction in November 2016 for $900,000. Her first paining to come to market was Untitled which sold for $93,000 in September 2016 at Sotheby's New York.

In 2015, Jamillah James, a former Studio Museum in Harlem curator and at the time, assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, organized Akunyili Crosby's first solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum. That same year, James organized another exhibition of Akunyili Crosby's work at Art and Practice in Los Angeles.

After graduating from Yale in 2011, Akunyili Crosby was selected as artist-in-residence at the highly regarded Studio Museum in Harlem, known for promoting and supporting emerging African artists. During this residency she met her mentor, New-York based artist, Wangechi Mutu. She spent her year of residence experimenting with drawing, figure painting, studying contemporary art, postcolonial history and diasporic studies.

After graduating from Swarthmore in 2004, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. This is where she earned a post-baccalaureate certificate in 2006. She later attended the Yale University School of Art, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.

In 1999 , at the age of 16, she left home with her sister, Ijeoma, and moved to the United States. She spent a gap year studying for her SAT's and taking American history classes before returning to Nigeria to serve a year of National Service. After she completed her service, she returned to the United States to study in Philadelphia. She took her first oil painting class at the Community College of Philadelphia where her teacher Jeff Reed encouraged her to apply to Swarthmore College. She graduated Swarthmore College in 2004, where she studied art and biology as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She was at first getting pre-medical requirements to pursue a career in medicine before deciding to pursue art. She didn't pursue art until her senior year at Swarthmore after realizing she enjoyed her art classes more than her Organic Chemistry and Advanced Biology classes. She felt the urgency to tell her experience as a Nigerian in the diaspora through her art.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983) is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Akunyili Crosby's art "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds". In 2017, Akunyili Crosby was awarded the prestigious Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Njideka Akunyili was born in 1983 and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. She is of Igbo descent. One of six siblings, Akunyili Crosby's father was a surgeon and her mother was a professor of pharmacology at the University of Nigeria. She moved to Lagos when she was ten years old to attend the secondary school Queen's College (QC) Yaba, Lagos. Her mother won the U.S. green card lottery for the family enabling Akunyili Crosby and her siblings to study abroad.