Placed Leaders

Awam Amkpa

Dean of Arts and Humanities

New York University Abu Dhabi

Koya | Diversified Search Group partnered with New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) on its Dean of Arts and Humanities search. NYU Abu Dhabi is pioneering a new model of higher education for a global world, dedicated to excellence in teaching and research and to advancing cooperation and progress on humanity’s shared challenges.

NYUAD offers an outstanding liberal arts and sciences education to students from the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and around the world, with a distinctive focus on intercultural understanding and leadership. It supports innovative research and graduate education programs that push forward the frontiers of knowledge and respond in powerful and interdisciplinary ways to vital global and local challenges.

Our partnership with NYUAD resulted in the appointment of Awam Amkpa as Dean of Arts and Humanities.

Amkpa is an accomplished and world-renowned theater scholar and practitioner-director, playwright and actor, filmmaker, and curator of visual and performing arts. He is a professor of Drama and Cultural Theory at the departments of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, and Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty of Arts and Sciences at New York University.

Before coming to NYU, Amkpa was a Senior Lecturer of Drama and Television at King Alfred’s University College in Winchester, England and Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at Mount Holyoke College.

He is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, London: Routledge, 2003, and Archetypes, Stereotypes and Polytypes: Theatres of the Black Atlantic. Additionally, he was the director of film documentaries including Winds Against Our Souls, It’s All About Downtown, National Images and Transnational Desires, and feature film Wazobia!, as well as the author of art catalogs, several articles in books and journals on modernisms in theater, postcolonial theater, Black Atlantic studies, and film studies.

As an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, Amkpa continues to exhibit globally and present his multifaceted scholarship in venues across the world.

Amkpa has BA in Dramatic Arts from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. He received an MA in Drama from Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Amkpa completed his PhD in Drama at the University of Bristol in the UK.