Ebele Okoye

Biography

In 2015, in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, the Africa Movie Academy Award for best animated film went to Ebele Okoye’s “The Legacy of Rubies”, a mid-length hand-drawn film made in Germany, Nigeria and the United States with support from Focus Features’ programme for African filmmakers. Accepting the award, Okoye said she had made the film not to chase prizes but to inspire every African animator who wants to make animated films. It was her second such award: the first, in 2008, had gone to her short “The Lunatic”.

Okoye was forty-five, and she had been working in animation for little more than ten years.

She was born on 6 October 1969 in Onitsha, in Anambra State. In 1985–1989 she studied fine and applied arts, graphic design and illustration at the Institute of Management and Technology in Enugu and earned a Higher National Diploma. For the next five years she worked as a graphic designer, copywriter and branding specialist and drew cartoons for agencies, tabloids and newspapers, among them the glossy magazine Classique. From 1995 she devoted herself to painting alone. That same year her first solo exhibition, “Storms of the Heart”, opened at the National Museum in Lagos; then came “Realities” (1996) and “New Culture” (1999) at the Didi Museum in Lagos and a show of portraits in oil (1998); in group exhibitions her work travelled to South Korea and was shown in Abuja. I have not been able to verify that she really was Nigeria’s first woman animator, but that is what she is called both at home and abroad.

In 2000 Okoye moved to Germany. First came a guest programme in African studies at the University of Cologne, then communication design at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf with a traineeship at West German Broadcasting (WDR), and in 2003–2004 traditional 2D animation at the Internationale Filmschule Köln. The exhibitions continued: “Woman about Women” in Cologne (2001), the travelling pictorial narrative “Nomadic Diaries” in Munich, Cologne, Halle and Neulengbach in Austria (2002), “Between Territories” in Cottbus (2003), “Globalia” at the Frauenmuseum in Bonn (2004). After film school she worked briefly as a key animator in studios, and from 2006 she began producing her own films. The project “Anna Blume”, based on a 1919 poem by Kurt Schwitters, won the Robert Bosch Foundation’s promotional prize, and the film came out in 2009; the five-minute “The Essence” (2010) collected several awards. Short films appeared almost every year: “Papermouse”, “Patterns”, “Meine Heimat”, “Die Liebe in den Zeiten der EU”, an abstract study of the Nigerian footballer Chi-Chi Igbo.

She puts a great deal of effort into helping Africa grow its own animators. In 2009 she founded the Shrinkfish studio in Abuja, which worked remotely; in 2010 the online community Animation Club Africa; in 2013 the Shrinkfish Media Lab course, the first in Nigeria, whose later editions were derailed by the Ebola epidemic. Then came a lab built around the free animation software OpenToonz (2015), the programme for freelancers Motion to the Sound with a separate course for young women (2021), and a studio making educational cartoons for preschoolers (2022). She wrote the Nigerian chapter for “Animation: A World History” by the Italian historian Giannalberto Bendazzi. She has taught at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and on Goethe-Institut courses in Nigeria and Tanzania, and has sat on juries and selection committees of festivals from Durban to Berlin’s Interfilm.

Since 2019 Okoye has been making animation in virtual reality. In 2020 she made an animated video for Universal Music to the Motown song “Dancing in the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas, and was co-director and animator of the two-hour Deutsche Welle documentary “Oil Promises”. Among her awards is Amnesty International’s Redefreiheit prize for outstanding media work on human rights issues. She lives in Berlin, where she has been since 2008.