Currently based in Grand Popo, Benin Republic, Tobi Onabolu is an artist and writer who works in an interdisciplinary and collaborative style across moving image, poetry, and performance. Interrogating the process of inner-child reconnection, Tobi uses his body and lived experience as a conceptual point of departure. His practice is concerned with expanding consciousness through space and across time, as an avenue for personal and collective healing. Playing with breathwork, movement, and dance, his work evokes the ethereal, considering humans beyond their physical form, as energetic and spiritual beings.
He holds an MA in African Studies from SOAS, with a thesis on his great uncle, Aina Onabolu, the founding father of Nigerian modernism. He is a Film London Artist Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) Fellow; a G.A.S. Foundation Fellow; and is an Artistic Advisory Board member for Culturescapes Biennale, Basel. Exhibition and performance highlights include Videotage, Hong Kong; RCA, London; and the Royal Albert Hall, London. Tobi has recently been awarded the 2025 Aesthetica Art Prize for his single-channel film, Danse Macabre, which is currently on view at York Gallery, York, until January 2026.