Chidinma Nnoli

Chidinma Nnoli (b. 1998, Enugu) is an artist working primarily with painting.

Through a practice largely shaped by constant conflict with self and a background saturated with religion and gendered obligations, Nnoli questions the tension between fate and free will, not only as lived experiences but also as recurring formal challenges within the act of painting. 

By treating the canvas as a living surface that can resist, absorb, betray, or interrupt her intention, her work becomes a site where agency is unstable, both for the subjects and herself as the artist. Whether through a sudden visual rupture or a hazy, dissolving atmosphere, Nnoli creates passages that move from subject to space, space to spirit, and spirit to history. Evoking what can most deeply be felt as intense, poetic, and balanced, even in its continuous state of becoming.

Nnoli earned her BFA from the University of Benin, Nigeria, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.