SuAndi

SuAndi (born 1951) is a British performance poet, writer and arts curator.[1]

Life

SuAndi was born in Hulme, Manchester to a British mother and Nigerian father. She was active as a dancer and model before starting to perform her poetry in 1985. Since the mid-1980s she has also been the freelance Cultural Director of the National Black Arts Alliance, the UK's largest network of Black artists.[2]

SuAndi has performed at poetry venues and festivals both nationally and internationally. She has also developed performance works with a sustained structure and visual component to them, including This is All I've Got to Say (1993) and The Story of M, commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1994.[1] The Story of M was a solo performance piece written in tribute to SuAndi's mother. While sitting in a white screened hospital ward, visual projections of family photographs accompany the performer's memories of her mother's life and death.

SuAndi has written two librettos: Mary Seacole had a West End opening and toured Britain in 2000, and The Calling was performed by the BBC Philharmonic in 2005.[2]

Strength of our Mothers (2019) was a series of interviews with 23 white women in interracial relationships with African and Afro-Caribbean men.[3]

Awards

In 1996 SuAndi was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship.[1] In the 1999 New Year Honours she received an OBE for her contributions to black art in Britain.[4] She also received a Windrush Inspirational Award in 1003, and a NESTA Dreamtime Award in 2005. She has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lancaster in 2015 and from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2018.[2]

Selected works
  • Style in Performance. Purple Heather & Pankhurst Press, 1990. ISBN 1-871426-30-8
  • Nearly Forty. Spike Books, 1992. ISBN 0-9518978-0-2
  • There Will be No Tears. Manchester: Pankhurst Press, 1995.
  • (ed.) 4 for more: poses a contextualisation of black work juxtaposed to the larger arena. Manchester: ArtBlacklive Publication for Black Arts Alliance, 2002. ISBN 0954276604
  • I Love the Blackness of my People, 2003.
  • 'Africa Lives On in We: Histories and Futures of Black Women Artists', in E. Aston et al. (eds.) Feminist Futures?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
  • The Story of M. London: Oberon Books, 2017.
  • (ed.) Strength of Our Mothers. Independent Publishing Network, 2019. ISBN 1789721296
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References
  1. Catherine Ugwu (2002). "SulAndi". In Alison Donnell (ed.). Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. Routledge. p. 289. ISBN 978-1-134-70025-7.
  2. SuAndi, Black British Women Writers. Accessed 30 July 2020.
  3. Strength of our Mothers
  4. Order of the British Empire, The Guardian, 31 December 1998. Accessed 30 July 2020.
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