ChoreoTech Lab Program | Program Director
July 22 – July 28
Qudus Onikeku (he/him) is a renowned artist, researcher, innovator, social impact engineer, and the founder and Artistic Director of the QDance Center, who subliminally uses art for non-art outcomes. Over the last decade, Onikeku has established himself as a major international artist, working with different media including performance, installation, curating, and community organizing. His international artistic practice intersects between his interest in visceral body movements, kinesthetic memory, and embracing both an artistic vision and a futuristic practice of which both respect and challenge Yoruba artistic traditions.
With QDance Company, Onikeku has created a substantial body of critically acclaimed work that ranges from solos to group works, as well as artist-to-artist collaborations with visual artists, architects, musicians, writers, multimedia artists, data scientists, and creative technologists. In 2009, after completing his higher education in France, Onikeku created his first company, YK projects, in Paris, with which he created several solo and group dance pieces of critical acclaim. In 2014, Onikeku returned to Lagos with his partner Hajarat, and together they co-founded the QDance Center, serving as an incubator with which they examined and experimented the possible intersections between arts and society.
Onikeku has been an international favorite on major stages and festivals across various countries including Biennale de Lyon, Festival d’Avignon, Centre Pompidou, Philharmonie de Paris (France), TED Global, Venice Biennale, Torino Danza, Roma Europa (Italy), Kalamata Dance Festival (Greece), Dance Umbrella (UK), Bates Dance Festival (USA), and Festival TransAmerique (Canada). Onikeku’s dance works are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada and he has been a Visiting Professor of Dance at the University of California Davis and Columbia College in Chicago.
Onikeku is currently the first Maker in Residence at The Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship of the University of Florida. His current research ATUNDA, explores a deep technological solution, an Al-ready dataset for dance recognition and movement analysis, to lay a background for cutting-edge interactive systems to synthesize, preserve, protect, and securely share dance and movement data in the age of virality. With his team, Onikeku recently started the QSchool of Movement, Sound, and Media Art for young creatives in Nigeria. For more information, please visit https://www.qudusonikeku.com/.
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