Meet Enuma

Enuma Okoro is a Nigerian-American author, writer, art critic, theologian, spiritual director, lecturer, and curator. Born in New York city and raised in Cote d’Ivoire, England, Tunisia, North America and Nigeria, she is an op-ed weekend columnist for The Financial Times, where her globally read column, “The Art of Life,” explores how the intersection of art, culture, myth, contemplative and embodied spiritual traditions, and ecology can speak to the human condition, how we live, and how we relate to the rest of the natural world. Her wider research interests include understanding art as a site for quiet interrogation and the deepening and expanding of our capacity for reflection and transformation, hagiography and mystical theology, women’s spiritual and creative practices, experiences, and ways of documenting embodied wisdom, and the dialogue between movement (pilgrimage, migrations, re-locations, and bodily gestures), place, space and interiority.

Underlying this interrogation is a deeper interest in the power of narrative, myth, story, and religious and cultural traditions that shape collective consciousness. She writes, lectures, curates and hosts public conversations with the grounding premise that the stories we believe and tell ourselves become the stories we live by, and by which we build our interior and exterior worlds. Yet most of our working stories are formed from unquestioned and inherited narratives, and those primarily steeped in patriarchal and Western traditions and epistemologies. It is also with stories, through their varying mediums, that we challenge old or false narratives, free our imaginations and tell new and expanded truths that shift perceptions and instigate change. Okoro believes that stories are everywhere. Even the trees and the rivers and the animals hold them.

Her educational training and professional background is in Psychology and Communication, Family Systems Therapy, and Theology. Raised and still active in the Roman Catholic tradition, her spiritual practice is also heavily influenced by the mindfulness and engaged Buddhism tradition of Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh. She received her Master of Divinity degree (2004) from Duke University Divinity School where she also served for several years as the Director for the Center for Theological Writing. She is a certified Spiritual Director in the Ignatian Tradition (Jesuits).

In addition to writing, speaking and curating, Okoro hosts podcasts, teaches seminars and leads workshops. Since 2018 she has taught summer seminars at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Saint John's Abbey and Benedictine University in Collegeville, Minnesota. In fall 2025 she was a guest professor at Bard College Berlin in the department of Art History, where she introduced and taught a new course for the institutiondeveloped from her research on the history of the black female figure in western art.

Okoro has published four books of nonfiction, The Reluctant Pilgrim (2010), Common Prayer, A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (2010, co-authored with Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove), Silence and Other Surprising Invitations of Advent (2012), and Talking Taboo, (2013, co-edited with Erin S. Lane). Her articles and essays have been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Artsy, Harper’s Bazaar, Cultured Magazine, CNN African Voices, Vogue, AEON Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian and other media outlets. Her poetry and fiction is published in anthologies.

She curated the multidisciplinary group exhibition, “The Flesh of the Earth” for Hauser & Wirth gallery (February 1 - April 6 2024). “Through work by artists Olafur Eliasson, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Jenny Holzer, Rashid Johnson, Haley Mellin, Cassi Namoda, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Billie Zangewa, the presentation, in the words of Okoro, ‘encourages us all to consider ways of decentering ourselves from the prevalent anthropocentric narrative, to reimagine a more intimate relationship with the earth and to renew our connection with the life-force energy that surges through all of creation, both human and more-than-human.’”

In June 2012 Okoro was the Theologian and Writer-In-Residence at the American Church in Paris, France, where she also became the first woman of African descent to give a sermon from the historic 200-year-old platform of The American Church in Paris. Martin Luther King Jr. was the first man of African descent to speak from the same platform in October 1965.

She has delivered a TEDx talk on the global perceptions of multicultural women, identity and the power of cultural collisions.

Her multiple speaking invitations have included the Harvard Business School, Oxford University, Princeton University, Humboldt Forum, the Diane Von Furstenberg’s International Women’s Day, Villa Malta (Rome, Italy) in collaboration with Georgetown University, Moody Center for the Arts, Frieze New York Art Fair, the Business for Africa and the World Forum in Egypt, Human Rights Watch, Young President’s Organization, the Atlantic Dialogues Conference (Policy Center for the New South) in Marrakech, The Abu Dhabi Culture Summit, The Bloomberg Media Conference, Frieze, and more.

Her first book, Reluctant Pilgrim was recognized by USA Book News as a 2010 Best Books Award Winning Finalist for Religion, and received the 2011 Indie National Book Awards Winning Finalist in Spirituality and Non-Fiction.

In March 2018 she was recognized on the 100 Most Inspiring Women in Nigeria list and featured in The Guardian national newspaper.

Okoro has been the recipient of a writing fellowship at MacDowell Residency (2023) creative fellowships at the Callaloo Creative Writing Program at Brown University (2014), the Kimbilio Writing Residency in Taos(2016), New Mexico and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation’s International Artists Residency Program in Umbria, Italy (2018). Most recently she received an invitation to be a summer 2026 Writer-in-Residence at Temporars Susch, Muzeum Susch in the Engadin Valley, Switzerland.