Ama BE

Ama BE is a Ghanaian artist weaving her life between the US and West Africa. Her work engages the entangled histories of African land stewardship, labor, and migration ecologies, positioning natural elements as both medium and collaborator. Through the use of botanical materials—laden with paradoxical associations of commodification, violence, healing, and spirituality—she explores how the natural world might re-script dominant narratives surrounding
Black and African bodies.

Ama’s interdisciplinary approach spans performance, moving image, sculptural organic textiles,
and emerging technologies. Her practice is grounded in a sustained inquiry into affective relations with land. Ama explores the quiet metrics of contact between Black/African bodies and
landscape to challenge loss and dispossession. These themes are central to her award-winning
collaborative project Black Body Radiation: Rescripting Data Bodies, which interrogates data colonialism and corporeality.

An alum of Àsìkò Art School and co-editor of On Place-based Artist Pedagogies , Ama’s work
has been shown at the 15th Dakar Biennale, Ars Electronica Festival (2024), the Corcoran
Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum for African Art. In 2023, she was awarded
the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Wherewithal Research Grant for her ongoing project Ngo {palm
oil}, a transdisciplinary archive and living inquiry. She holds an MA in Global Creative & Cultural
Industry from SOAS, University of London.