About
Suzan Adélakùn is a Nigerian-Indian multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines water cosmologies, diasporic memory, and ancestral knowledge across the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, to a Nigerian father and Indian mother, she was raised in Nagpur, India, and currently lives and works between Brooklyn, New York, and Toronto, Canada.
Drawing from her biracial heritage, Adélakun's work interrogates the erasure of pre-colonial cosmologies while reclaiming matriarchal frameworks embedded in both Yoruba and South Asian cultural traditions. Through photography, sculpture, installation, textile, and documentary film, she creates visual counter-archives that bridge oceanic geographies and spiritual genealogies. Her practice transforms construction materials, marine debris, recycled glass, and natural dyes into vessels for ancestral memory and ecological witness.
Adélakùn is the founder of Future Griots Collective and operates as Suzan Adélakun Studios LLC. She currently holds a BRIClab Film and TV Artist Residency at BRIC, Brooklyn, and has completed residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Governors Island Arts Center), Andrew Freedman Home (Bronx), and HomeCourt (Toronto).
Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Toronto History Museums, and Union Station Toronto, among others. She is a two-time award recipient: Canadian Women Artist of the Year by the New York Foundation for the Arts (2020) and Breakthrough Artist Award by the Toronto Arts Foundation (2024).
CONTACT
Formerly working as Destinie Adélakùn