Nkeiruka Oruche

Nkeiruka Oruche

executive artistic director

An Igbo cultural organizer, multimedia creative, and multidisciplinary performer, Nkeiruka Oruche specializes in Afro-Urban culture’s intersections with identity and sociopolitical action. Since 2002, she has played a crucial role in ushering African culture onto the global stage as Editor-in-Chief of Nigerianentertainment.com, a digital magazine, and as co-founder of One3snapshot, an art collective.  In 2020, she created and produced ‘Let Me Come & Be Going’, an Afro-urban dance-theater piece exploring the trials and tribulations of transportation for Black folks. 

Her immersion into dance and culture began as a child from her ancestral hometown Amichi and from learning popular dance from her Aunt Obiageli. Living in the Bronx, Stone Mountain, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area inspired Nkeiruka’s love of diverse Afro-urban cultures. Public health and social justice studies fostered her Pan African culture-making approach.

She is a YBCA 100 Honoree, a Creatives-In-Place Fellow, Kikwetu Honors Awardee, Izzie Awardee, and a former NYFA Immigrant Artist Fellow. She has received awards from Creative Work Fund, MAP, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, California Arts Council, and East Bay Community Foundation.

Nkeiruka has presented at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Oakland Museum of California, Yoshi’s, Dance Mission Theater, the Independent, and the California Academy of Sciences and shared stages with Magic System, Les Twins, Elephant Man, and Onyeka Owenu. She has worked in performing arts production and community organizing with Monica Hastings-Smith, Amara Tabor-Smith, Ellen Sebastian-Chang, Stern Grove Festival, Youth Speaks, Loco Bloco, and SF Boys & Girls Clubs.

Currently, Nkeiruka is focused on expanding and sustaining grassroots change-making and community health through the production, performance and embodiment of art and culture. She is a co-founder of BoomShake, a liberatory musical community of oppressed peoples, and Executive Artistic Director of Afro Urban Society, an incubator and presenter of Afro-Urban performing and visual arts, culture, media, and social discourse.