About NMO

Nnenna Maxine Odumodu (b. 1992, Lagos) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and creative producer. Her practice explores heritage and material culture through textile, film, sound, performance and exhibition making, with an interest in how cultural knowledge is transmitted through the objects we use, through craft practices and inherited materials, Her work explores how such knowledge can be preserved while being reinterpreted through contemporary practice.

In 2022, she repurposed inherited Aso-Oke cloth passed down through her family into three garments, accompanied by the spoken word film, Imagine, examining migration and inheritance, as well as the changing relationship between generations and traditional textiles. The project sparked an interest in the declining quality, availability and production of Aso-Oke, and the conditions under which traditional textile and craft knowledge is sustained.

Nnenna has built an independent textile and fashion practice centred on handmade crochet and slow craft. Since 2020, she has developed crochet garments and accessories, including skull caps, bucket hats, bags; translating handmade processes and West-African material traditions into contemporary design. Her practice is now expanding into natural dyeing, garment construction and research into traditional material processes.

Since 2017, she has worked across London galleries and cultural organisations on curatorial research, public programming, workshops, writing and production. In 2022, she curated Two Cities at the House of St. Barnabas, London bringing together five artists to examine access to cultural spaces. In 2024, she curated British Nigerian artist Emily Nkanga's Unyon Ufok at the Ibibio Museum in Akwa Ibom. In 2025, she curated Nkanga's first London solo exhibition at Purist Gallery. These projects have built her experience of facilitating Nigeria-UK artistic exchange and developing exhibitions grounded in research and lived experience.

In 2021, she participated in the Tom Sachs Research Laboratory, deepening her interest in research-led making and iterative process. In 2019, she co-produced Fashion in Practice, a documentary on how people in corporate environments use fashion to express identity and negotiate cloth as both functional and cultural language.