Folayemi Wilson

Professional Bio

Folayemi Wilson (she/they) is an object and image maker whose work celebrates the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. She is a co-founder and principal of blkHaUS studios, a socially-focused design studio that uses design as an agent of change to uplift and transform marginalized communities. She has been a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, 3Arts, the Propeller Fund, and a two-time recipient of an individual artist grant from the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies of the Fine Arts. Early in her career Wilson worked as a graphic designer and art director in New York, founding Studio W Inc., working for clients such as Black Entertainment Television (BET), Condé Nast Publications, Essence Communications, The New York Times, Time Warner, and Williams Sonoma, among others.

Wilson has been awarded residencies or fellowships from the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Black Genius Foundation, Haystack, Indigo Arts Alliance, MacDowell, Mass MoCA and the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMASS Amherst among others. Her work is included in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture, and she has held previous academic positions at Columbia College Chicago, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the California College of the Arts. 

Recent work and writing includes: a commission from the City of Chicago for public art as a part of a new CTA subway station; an essay in Expansions, a publication of the 2020 Biennale Architecttura in Venice, Italy; inclusion in The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection, (Allworth Press, 2022); and the forthcoming Race in Design History: An Anthology, (Princeton University Press, 2027).