Arts University Plymouth is an independent university-sector Higher Education (HE) provider located in Plymouth in South West England. The former Plymouth College of Art was officially granted university status in 2022. In April 2019 the specialist college was awarded taught degree awarding powers (TDAP) by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), granting the institution the authority to award and accredit its own BA (Hons) degrees and Masters awards.
Sir David Frank Adjaye is a Ghanaian-British architect who has designed many notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.. Adjaye was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. He received the 2021 Royal Gold Medal, making him the first African recipient and one of the youngest recipients. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2022.
Eileen Cooper is a British artist, known primarily as a painter and printmaker.
Alice Rawsthorn OBE is a British design critic and author. Her books include Design as an Attitude (2018) and Hello World: Where Design Meets Life (2013). She is chair of the board of trustees at the Chisenhale Gallery in London and at The Hepworth Wakefield gallery in Yorkshire. Rawsthorn is a founding member of Writers at Liberty, a group of writers who are committed to supporting the work of the human rights charity Liberty. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to design and the arts.
John Ebenezer Samuel de Graft-Hayford (1912–2002) was Ghana's first Ghanaian Chief of Air Staff. He became the first indigenous Air Force Commander in Ghana and Black Sub-Saharan Africa. He was also acting Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) for a brief period in 1962.
Iwona Maria Blazwick OBE is a British art critic and lecturer. She is currently the Chair of the Royal Commission for Al-'Ula’s Public Art Expert Panel. She was the Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from 2001 to 2022. She discovered Damien Hirst and staged his first solo show at a public London art gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1992. She supports the careers of young artists.
Dame Magdalene Anyango Namakhiya Odundo is a Kenyan-born British studio potter, who now lives in Farnham, Surrey. Her work is in the collections of notable museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Museum of African Art.
Sir John Akomfrah is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films".
Mitra Tabrizian is a British-Iranian photographer and film director. She is a professor of photography at the University of Westminster, London. Mitra Tabrizian has exhibited and published widely and in major international museums and galleries, including her solo exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2008. Her book, Another Country, with texts by Homi Bhabha, David Green, and Hamid Naficy, was published by Hatje Cantz in 2012.
Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford was a British fashion designer. Beginning in the mid-1980s he established an international reputation as one of the UK's most respected and consistently relevant designers of men's and womenswear clothing. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to the fashion industry, in the 2007 Birthday Honours.
John Owen Hunwick was a British academic, author, and Africanist. He published several books, articles and journals in the African Studies field. He was professor emeritus at Northwestern University, having retired in 2004 after 23 years of service. Hunwick died in Skokie, Illinois on 1 April 2015, at the age of 79.
Charlie Casely-Hayford is a menswear designer based in London, England, where he was born. He founded the international menswear brand Casely-Hayford at the age of 22 with his father, the acclaimed British fashion designer Joe Casely-Hayford OBE.
Beattie Casely-Hayford was a Ghanaian engineer. He was the first director of the Ghana Arts Council, a co-founder of the Ghana National Dance Ensemble, and a director of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC).
Hew Donald Joseph Locke is a British sculptor and contemporary visual artist based in Brixton, London. In 2000 he won a Paul Hamlyn Award and the EASTinternational Award. He grew up in Guyana, but lived most of his adult life in London.
Archibald "Archie" Casely-Hayford was a British-trained Ghanaian barrister and politician, who was involved in nationalist politics in the former Gold Coast. Having joined the Convention People's Party (CPP), in 1951 he was elected Municipal Member for Kumasi and was appointed by Kwame Nkrumah Minister of Agriculture and Natural Resources in the government of the First Republic. When Nkrumah declared Ghana's Independence on 6 March 1957, he was photographed on the podium flanked by Casely-Hayford, together with Kojo Botsio, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, Nathaniel Azarco Welbeck and Krobo Edusei.
Chinyere Adah "Chi-Chi" Nwanoku is a British double bassist and professor of Historical Double Bass Studies at the Royal Academy of Music. Nwanoku was a founder member and principal bassist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a position she held for 30 years.
Veronica Maudlyn Ryan is a Montserrat-born British sculptor. She moved to London with her parents when she was an infant and now lives between New York and Bristol. In December 2022, Ryan won the Turner Prize for her 'really poetic' work.
Margaret Yvonne Busby,, Hon. FRSL, also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, Busby was named as president of English PEN.
Casely-Hayford is an English language patronymic surname that is native to Ghana. It is most commonly borne by the Casely-Hayford family, descendants of the 19th century Euro-Fante and Pan-Africanist, J. E. Casely-Hayford of Cape Coast. The family is one of Ghana's most prominent families, and in recent times, its members have also risen to positions of influence in the Black British elite. In 2008, the Casely-Hayfords were named on "The Black Powerlist" as the most influential black family in the UK.
Africa '95 or Africa 95, styled as africa95, was a Britain-wide celebration of African music, art, dance and poetry that was held over several months during the last quarter of 1995, with more than 60 arts institutions throughout the UK participating in related events. It was chaired by English businessman Sir Michael Caine, with Clémentine Deliss as artistic director, under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth II, President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, and President Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal.
