Wana Udobang—with the moniker Wana Wana—is a powerhouse across African media and visual storytelling. Breezily, she moves through poetry, journalism, documentary filmmaking, performance art, and broadcasting. Few storytellers hold space for human emotion quite like Wana Udobang. Whether commanding the airwaves as a former radio host, delivering devastatingly honest spoken word on global stages, or building multidisciplinary gallery installations, Udobang sits at an intersection of radical vulnerability, cultural commentary, and artistic liberation.
Her four spoken word poetry albums have taken her on stages across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. Wana has been awarded the Ama Ata Aidoo Fellowship at Northwestern University and the Camargo Foundation Fellowship. Her journalism, documentaries, essays, and cultural commentary appear across The Guardian, Observer, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Roads & Kingdoms.
As an institutional consultant, she designs methodologies that transform how global museums and foundations engage with public memory and inclusive practice. Her portfolio includes the Zayed National Museum, the Deutsches Museum, the Übersee-Museum, and Fonds Soziokultur, alongside the NEO Lab Fellowship at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (MK&G) Hamburg. Her curatorial works and public art interventions include Dirty Laundry, Stripped, Who We Are When the Glory Is Gone, Between a Prayer and a Song, and the recipe-mapped food-ways series Reclaiming the Tongue. Wana also curates the archival project Culture Diaries and facilitates The Comfort Food Storytelling Workshop which uses food memory to tell new stories. The award-winning writer tells Yinka Olatunbosun how the power of change lies in words that move to action.
You are a powerful voice in the Nigerian literary space and in the media. What motivated you towards this career path?
From a young age, I always felt strongly about speaking up about the collective experiences of what was happening to people around me, particularly the lives of women I observed. As I grew older, I also found writing and creating cathartic for me. All these reasons fueled my interest and passion for work in both literature and media.
You poured your personal trauma and vulnerability into spoken word albums like Dirty Laundry, In Memory Of Forgetting, Transcendence and Dissonance. How did you convince yourself that you were ready to share those in public performance?
A lot of my work documents what I call both personal and collective histories. In many ways, I find that writing poems is an act of sense- or meaning-making. I don’t come to it thinking I just want to vomit things, but rather, I am trying to understand and make sense of the systems that cause these traumas and fractures. Then, hopefully, it can be the beginning of what follows, whether that’s healing or repair. But most importantly, making albums about many of these subjects and performing them to an audience becomes an invitation into that process of interrogation and sense-making. It also becomes a collective invitation into vulnerability. In many ways, each work is a different stage of interrogation rather than a convincing self.
How do you know whether your poetry is for the stage or should remain on the page?
I don’t ever think deeply about that or consider it at all. I write, utilising all the elements of form, language and storytelling as techniques to produce what I hope is a good poem. I also enjoy the sonic qualities of language that give the work music during a performance. My goal is to write a great poem that tells the story in the best possible way.
How has your background in broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking inspired the narrative style of your poetic works?
Those backgrounds certainly help me think about story structure. What story am I trying to tell, what is the best way or form to tell it, and how does it start, develop, and end? All of this comes from my journalism background. They help you keep things tight, work with constraints and help you think of the temperature undulating throughout a poem.
Your poetry has addressed grief, memory, and womanhood. What does the process of writing reveal to you about healing?
Writing really helps you confront your humanness. It is very much an act of interrogation and excavation. You find yourself peeling layers to the core. Being human can be fragile. Fragility teaches you about tenderness and time. So, healing and repair always require tenderness and time.
You’ve been a prominent advocate for body autonomy and self-acceptance, pushing against narrow beauty standards. What were the critical shifts in your personal journey toward loving your body?
I often say we don’t live in a vacuum; we exist in relation to the world, and the world places and imposes its own criteria on our bodies, even though most of the time it has nothing to do with us. The most important thing I find is genuinely knowing and believing you are inherently valuable as a human being, not because of the kind of body you have or what it can do. Then, I know there are far more interesting things about you. Then, finally, practice liking yourself, and hopefully you will develop a better relationship with it over time. How we feel about our bodies can oscillate from time to time. The goal is to move toward neutrality and joy. Someday, it is a functional tool, and some days it is embodied, pleasurable and excitable. Honestly, your body is only a fraction of all the incredible things you are and possess.
How do you distinguish between genuine self-love and the commercialised version of “body positivity” that dominates digital and wellness culture today?
Perhaps one is always trying to sell you something over the other. Love in general can also be quiet and embodied. It is the ways you care for yourself, the values you hold about how you treat yourself and how others treat you. It is the way you speak about yourself even when no one is there; it is the choices and decisions you make. It is not letting others’ projections limit your sense of possibility or interrupt your joy. It really comes through in how you move through the world. It is always a performance or captured in a slideshow.
Your personal style, interior aesthetics, and storytelling reflect a deliberate focus on beauty and comfort. What does living intentionally mean to you on an everyday basis?
Living intentionally for me is just living fully. Like you pointed out, I like beauty and comfort, but I also love ease and joy. I really want everyone who comes into my orbit to catch that energy too. I think the world always requires us. I want my life to feel relaxed and released from expectations. I don’t just like to carry that feeling; I find it reflects how I move through the world. I quite enjoy beautiful things that feel effortless and organic.
As a multidisciplinary creative, what boundaries have you set to prevent burning out?
I am great at project management and very structured as well. This means I am not overworked. I am also someone who thinks and plans my life holistically. When I plan, write, and design my ambitions or goals, I think about the tangible and intangible. How I want to feel matters just as much; it gives the goals substance. I also rest a lot. I sleep well, spend time with friends and family, and make time to enjoy other people’s art and other art as replenishment. I never want to become a productivity machine.
You have lived and exhibited across different cities globally. How does changing your physical environment influence your writing voice and sense of identity?
It doesn’t at all. We all share similar feelings and emotions as human beings, but they are just manifested through different stories. Different spaces and environments expand my artistic practice, evolve my craft, but they don’t really change the core of my voice or identity. But I am also open to growth, new ideas, new ways of being and doing as a person. My well of curiosity is unending, and however that moves me artistically, I think it is a good thing.
If you were to curate a “toolkit for emotional survival” for young African women navigating body image, creative ambition, and self-worth, what core practices would be in it?
Interrogate and disassemble who you have been told to be. Know and understand who you are and are becoming. Value what you have created. Keep expanding and take good care of yourself. Just know that you are a co-creator of the life you live. Move through this world with a sense of agency.
Your poetic work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of West African Arts (MOWAA). How does being a culturally relevant figure shape your everyday habits? Do you still hunger for more despite your accomplishments?
I find my hunger is more connected to curiosity, learning, growing and impact as much as it is to ambition/accomplishment. I am always curious about what my art can do, where it can take me, the ways and spaces in which it can iterate itself. For me, that feeling is unending, and it governs my habits and decision-making daily.
