Photo credit: Lowel Alomar
Destinie Adélakun
Destinie Adélakun (b. 1990, Lagos, Nigeria) lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and Toronto, CA she creates works that reaches the depths of African and Caribbean diasporic stories to convey a collective story to life. Her work extends from photography to film, paintings, textiles, and sculpture; which explore themes that are situated in the ideology of Matriarchal rule and pre-colonial African and South-Asian history, mythology, and spirituality. Rebelling against the constructs and the predominance of the European imprint on Black culture. Her goal as an artist is to empower people of the diaspora by narrating West African and South Asian folklore, history, and mythology. She celebrates women of the African diaspora and plays with adornment that embodies the creative direction of the work.
Her values and experiences drive Destinie’s films — themes of social justice, empowerment, identity, ancestry, and belonging are strong in her work. For the last five years, she has worked as a writer-director and producer.
Destinie was awarded the Canadian Women Artist of the Year Award, in 2020, by the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Adélakun also co-founded Behind the Arts Collective, a not-for-profit grassroots organization that creates arts programming for the BIPOC community to create mental health awareness in immigrant communities.
〰️
〰️