CEO

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie (Ph.D. Art History, Northwestern University) is a faculty of the department of History of Arts and Architecture at the University of California Santa Barbara, and an expert on Classical, Modern, and Contemporary African and African Diaspora Arts and Visual Culture. His research evaluates the colonial and postcolonial conventions of representation in global African arts. His book, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist is forthcoming from the University of Rochester Press. His articles and reviews have appeared in African Arts, Arts Journal, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Revue Noire, Ijele, the international Journal of Photography, and several important art history anthologies. He is the founder of Aachron Incorporated, and founder and editor-in-chief of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. He also serves on the editorial board of many significant journals on African arts.

Dr. Ogbechie is a respected art historian with two decades of experience in academic research, cultural development, and arts management. He pioneered the concept of African Knowledge Systems© management through his research on art and cultural development programs in Africa, Europe, and the USA. Through Aachron’s publishing imprint—Aachron Editions, he oversees several significant African knowledge content production projects and his scholarship has significantly contributed to a re-evaluation of global African arts and culture in the Nigerian and American educational system.

Dr. Ogbechie is a curatorial adviser to the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and also consults for other museums and cultural institutions worldwide. In 2004, he served as a curatorial consultant for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and received the City of Philadelphia Citation Award for contributions to the city’s 2004 Echoes of Africa cultural program. He is currently a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2007 where he is expected to provide expert consultation about incorporating contemporary African arts into the exhibition program of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum. He is the manager of the Mbanefo Foundation of New York (www.mbanefofoundation.org), and the Lazarus Foundation Art Collection based in Los Angeles.

 In 2005, Dr. Ogbechie convened the First International Nollywood Convention and Symposium (June 13-17, 2005 in Los Angeles, California, USA). The convention inaugurated a scholarly discourse on Nigerian video-film and was widely praised for the forum it created. He is co-founder and Vice President of the Nollywood Foundation (www.nollywoodfoundation.org), which organizes the annual Nollywood Foundation Convention, a forum that brings together stakeholders in Nollywood and Hollywood for mutual engagement.

Dr. Ogbechie has presented numerous public lectures in prestigious Universities, museums, art and cultural institutions in the USA, Europe, and Africa. He is the current President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), the umbrella body of international scholarship in African Arts Studies.