The Arts

The Vice Provost for the Arts supports and advises the Provost on arts initiatives, priorities, and strategies to deepen the integration of the arts into the academic and research experience at NYU Abu Dhabi. The Vice Provost for the Arts oversees NYUAD's public-facing arts units, the Art Gallery and Arts Center, and facilitates greater collaboration between NYUAD arts entities and corresponding units across NYU's global network, the region, and around the world.

Awam Amkpa is also the Dean of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi. Awam is an accomplished and world-renowned theater scholar and practitioner-director, playwright and actor, filmmaker and curator of visual and performing arts. He is a professor of Drama and Cultural Theory at the departments of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts and Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty of Arts and Sciences at New York University and of Film and New Media at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Awam received his BA in Dramatic Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University and his MA in Drama at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and completed his PhD in Drama at the University of Bristol in the UK. Before coming to NYU, Awam was a Senior Lecturer of Drama and Television at King Alfred’s University College in Winchester, England, and Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at Mount Holyoke College in the US.

He is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, the Look-book Archetypes, Stereotypes and Polytypes: Theaters of the Black Atlantic, art catalogs ReSignifications, Africa: See You, See Me; AfroEuropa:Incontri, and several articles in books and journals on modernisms in theater, postcolonial theater, Black Atlantic studies, and film studies. Additionally, he was the director of film documentaries including Winds Against Our Souls, It's All About Downtown, National Images and Transnational Desires, A Very, Very Short Story of Nollywood, wole Soyinka: A Humanist Ode For Chibok, and feature film Wazobia!. As an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, Awam continues to curate and exhibit globally, make films, work in performance art and present his multifaceted scholarship in venues across the world.

Key People