BIO
Selassie Atadika is a Ghana-based food systems strategist and the founder of Midunu. Trained as a human geographer, she spent over a decade in humanitarian emergency response with UNICEF across sub-Saharan Africa before founding Midunu in 2014. Her work places African foodways and the practices of inheritance at the center of contemporary discourse, pursued through food, at a table, in writing, on a stage, in a field.
Her practice has expanded steadily into installation. In 2018 she contributed to Palaver + Palaver at the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, a mycelium-grown investigation of the Ghanaian kitchen developed with Mae-ling Lokko, Nana Ofori-Atta Ayim, and Gustavo Crembil. From 2021 to 2022 she was the inaugural artist in residence at El Anatsui's Tema studio, where her continued collaboration with Mae-ling Lokko produced Elemental Table (2021), presented at Z33 House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium, and The Rise and Fall of Ghana's Cash Crops (2022), a dinner-installation in Ghana that cultivated over 100 rice accessions from AfricaRice's regional seed bank.
She is currently developing two installation projects rooted in African material inheritance: Commodity/Couture, a cocoa work showing alongside 1-54 London in October 2026, and The Grain We Share, a rice-centered public installation planned for Black Star Square, Accra in 2028. Her book Gather and Feast is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in 2027.
“Food is where culture begins. Before the city, before institutions, before monuments, there was a decision to tend something, to learn what it needed, to pass that knowledge to the next person. That knowledge built everything that came after it.
It is disappearing. The move from community to convenience happened faster than anyone thought to stop and ask the last person who knew.
I make work that puts that knowledge in the center of the room. Through food, at a table, in writing, on a stage, in a field. Each form asks the same question. Each form makes it harder to look away.”
HONORS LIST
• TIME Earth Award, 2025, first Ghanaian recipient
• Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow, 2026
• Yale Global Table Fellow and inaugural MacMillan Fellow
• La Liste New Destination Champion Award
• Top 100 Chefs in the World, The Best Chef Awards