Yemi Osokoya
CEO/FOUNDER
Yemi Afolabi Osokoya is a Lagos-based movement artist, choreographer, filmmaker, and cultural organizer working across performance, film, and community practice. Rooted in Afro-urban expression, his work explores body intelligence, environment, and reinvention, using movement as a tool for adaptation and collective memory.
He is a founding member of Westsyde Lifestyle and the founder of Afrocan, a movement-based
dance community in Nigeria led collaboratively with a team of four executive partners. Together they organize the Afrocan Festival, a platform dedicated to art, ritual, and communal gathering.
Yemi has collaborated with Wizkid, Major Lazer, and Burna Boy, toured with Q Dance Company
under Qudus Onikeku (Re-incarnation, 2020–2021), and performed internationally.
He was performer and co-curator of Egbe Ayo Tabi Egun Ayo: Days of Joy at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, a performer and instructor at Flavourama Festival, Austria, and is currently co-director and performer of Afrikan Party by Oulouy and SuperRichKids, produced by Africa Moment.
Artistic Statement
I make work because Lagos is always speaking, in traffic, in bodies, in the space between a shout and a silence and most of it goes unheard. My practice as a movement artist, choreographer, and filmmaker is an act of listening made visible. I translate what the city carries but doesn't say,
its contradictions, its pulse, its grief, its joy that refuses to sit still.
I work from body intelligence, the knowledge that lives in muscle and breath before it reaches language. Movement is not illustration for me, it is the primary text. Through performance and film, I build immersive environments where the familiar becomes strange, where Afro urban identity is not explained but felt in rhythm, in rupture, in the charged space between bodies.
What I'm after is the moment something unscripted breaks through. I chase it in every project in collaboration with dancers, communities, and the unpredictable life of Lagos itself. My work doesn't ask audiences to observe from a comfortable distance. It puts them in motion, even when they're standing still.
This is an ongoing practice of reinvention, rooted in place, driven by what the body knows, and committed to amplifying the voices that shape our collective story.