Artist bio

Weruché Uzoka (b. 1977, Lagos, Nigeria) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.

Weruché Uzoka is a Nigerian-born mixed-media artist, multi-media journalist, poet, and auto-ethnographer whose work investigates memory, movement, and cultural inheritance shaped by migration. Across layered mixed media and acrylic painting, Uzoka treats personal history, African histories, travel, and mythology as living archives, tracing how memory, identity, and place are carried, fragmented, and remade. Her practice centers on questions of home, belonging, and womanhood in the diaspora, offering intimate reflections on the immigrant experience and the unseen labor of becoming “seen” in unfamiliar worlds.

Having worked in digital media for over a decade, Uzoka has since transitioned fully to hand painting, embracing the immediacy and tactility of brushwork. Her canvases are intentionally layered and textural, honoring the honesty of brush painting—a practice that often guides her expression in directions she cannot decide in advance. Uzoka takes the meaning of mixed media to a whole new level, merging painting, collage, and poetry into immersive visual narratives. An invisible thread connects all aspects of her work—storytelling as lived experience, memory made tangible, and cultural inheritance rendered across multiple forms. Her work is not performative; it is research-driven, reflective, and deeply personal, born from journeys that span movement and migration, the story of Festac Baby-, and the intimate, transformative experiences that shape selfhood.

Her work has been presented at the United Nations in collaboration with Princess Naku, the Black Haven Festival in New Haven, CT, and Victory Theatre in Burbank, CA, and is poised for exhibitions across Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. Uzoka’s interdisciplinary practice bridges visual art, poetry, storytelling, and human rights, reflecting her background in journalism and her autoethnographic approach to the ethics of representation. She is now extending her practice to ensure her poems have multiple visual representations, creating intersections between language, image, and memory.

Since relocating to the United States in 2005, Uzoka has lived and worked in Connecticut and Los Angeles, cultivating a body of work that moves fluidly between painting, mixed media, poetry, and narrative forms. Whether working on a layered canvas, an installation, or a text-based visual piece, her work exists as living archives—testaments to the persistence of memory, the complexity of migration, and the quiet strength of those navigating new worlds.

Artist Statement:

"I honor the gentle honesty of brush painting that allows my expression to sometimes tell me where it wants to go, even before I can decide." 

- Weruché Uzoka - Los Angeles, CA