Ebele Okoye

Education

Okoye studied Fine and Applied Arts (Graphic design/Illustration) at the Institute of Management and Technology in Enugu from 1985 to 1989. On arriving Germany in 2000, she did a guest programme at the University of Cologne, which she promptly left to go register in Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. From 2003 to 2004, Okoye trained in traditional 2D cartoon animation at the Internationale filmschule köln. She is a fluent speaker of Igbo, English, and German.

Career

Ebele Okoye is active in fine and media arts and constantly shows her works in both one-man and group exhibitions (see below). She is founder of Shrinkfish Media Lab, a production company based in Abuja. In 2016 she announced plans for a feature-length film, hinting that it might be "like Chronicles of Narnia and Pocahontas put together."

Awards

Her 2007 project Anna Blume, based on a 1919 poem by Kurt Schwitters, won the Robert Bosch Foundation Promotional Prize for Animation. Okoye has won two Africa Movie Academy Awards, for The Lunatic (2008) and for The Legacy of Rubies (2015). "I did not make this film to chase awards," she said in her acceptance speech for the latter, in South Africa. "I made this film, to inspire every African animator who wants to make animation films." The Legacy of Rubies was one of the two closing films at the 2015 Silicon Valley African Film Fest. The same film had its Canadian premiere at the Toronto Black Film Festival in 2016.

Selected group exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

Filmography