Wana Udobang

 is a writer, poet, performer and storyteller. She released three spoken word albums titled Dirty Laundry, In Memory of Forgetting and Transcendence. Her work as a performer has taken her across Africa, Europe and the US, along with working on commissions for Edinburgh International Festival, Bristol Festival and Deutsches Museum in Germany. In 2021 she was awarded the International Writing programme residency at the University of IOWA and the inaugural Ama Ata Aidoo Fellowship at Northwestern University in 2022

Wana has a background in journalism working with the Guardian, Aljazeera, CNN, and Observer as well as producing and presenting documentaries for BBC Radio4 and BBC World Service. Her work in film includes the documentaries Sensitive Skin, Warriors and Nylon. Her curatorial projects include “Strip” for Rele gallery and “Reclaiming the tongue” a video series exploring history, geography and memory through food.

Wana runs The Comfort Food poetry workshop which uses memories around food as a conduit to create new poems. She curates Culture Diaries; an archival project which uses multi-platform storytelling to document African artists. In 2022, she showed her first solo multimedia project Dirty Laundry, an immersive installation of poems printed on linen hanging from laundry lines.

Added to her creative work, Wana is a speaker, teacher, workshop facilitator and creative consultant. She loves travel, food, wine, art and adventure.