SuAndi


SuAndi is a British performance poet, writer and arts curator.

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.
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 and The Story of M, commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1994. 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.
Strength of our Mothers was a series of interviews with 23 white women in interracial relationships with African and Afro-Caribbean men.

Awards

In 1996 SuAndi was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship. In the 1999 New Year Honours she received an OBE for her contributions to black art in Britain. 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.

Selected works