Destinie Adélakun

Destinie Adélakun is an award-winning Nigerian-Indian multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based between Toronto, New York, and Lagos. Her work—anchored in spiritual reclamation, matriarchal history, and diasporic storytelling—spans photography, film, painting, textiles, and sculpture.

She has exhibited and presented her work with esteemed institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Toronto History Museums, Nuit Blanche Toronto, and the SECCA Contemporary Gallery in North Carolina. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Andrew Freedman House in the Bronx and LMCC Arts Center Residency on Governors Island. Her previous residencies include the City of Toronto’s Clarke Centre for the Arts and the Nike Art Gallery in Lagos, Nigeria.

A two-time award recipient, Destinie was named Canadian Women Artist of the Year by the New York Foundation for the Arts (2020) and received the Breakthrough Artist Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation (2024) for her outstanding contributions to contemporary art and social impact.

Drawing from her Nigerian-Yoruba and South Indian heritage, Destinie’s work explores pre-colonial mythologies, matriarchal systems, ancestral memory, and resistance. Through her lens, she reclaims African and South Asian cosmologies while confronting the Eurocentric erasure of Black and Brown identities. Her visual language is one of adornment, reverence, and radical re-imagination—often celebrating the women of the diaspora as divine figures of power and transformation.

As a director, producer, and storyteller, she is committed to amplifying the collective voices of the African and Caribbean diaspora, using art as a tool for cultural revival, healing, and justice.

Canadian Women Artist Award Recipient 2020 New York Foundations for the Arts

Breakthrough Artist Award Recipient 2024 Toronto Arts Foundation