HANEEFAH ADAM

Biography

Haneefah Adam is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans food art, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, embroidery, and digital illustration. Internationally recognized for her pioneering food art, Adam uses a wide range of media to explore theme of identity, memory, culture, motherhood, and representation, often drawing from personal history and the socio-political landscape of contemporary Africa.

A self-taught artist with a background in medical sciences, Adam holds an MSc in Pharmacology and Drug Discovery from Coventry University, UK. Her work gained early acclaim when she won the #TechMeetsArt competition in 2016, leading to her participation in Rele Art Gallery’s collaboration with Samsung West Africa. She held her debut solo exhibition Life Long Percussion at Angels and Muse, Lagos in 2018 and has since exhibited widely, including at Her Story (Rele Art Gallery, 2018), Impart Art Fair (2019), A Changing Landscape: The Female (Van Der Plas Gallery, New York), and as an ANF Creative Fellow (2022).

In 2024, she was awarded The Future Awards Africa Prize for Art, and featured on the Keep Walking: Africa Top 30 List in the art category in 2023. Her ongoing work, What We Carry, blends open studio practices with sculpture and installation to interrogate memory, transformation, and emotional labor.

Her work has been featured in CNN’s African Voices, BBC, Financial Times, and more. She has collaborated with global and regional brands including Google, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Islamic Relief UK, MTN, Dangote Salt, and the United Nations Refugee Agency.

Adam currently lives and works in Lagos.