2025 ILLUMINATIONS GRANT FINALIST
MARCELLINE MANDENG NKEN
Image courtesy of the artist.
Marcelline Mandeng Nken (b. 1993, Yaoundé, Cameroon) is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, new media, text, and performance. Rooted in a background as a social worker and a maternal lineage of nurse practitioners, her practice weaves movement, memory, and material into rituals of repair, exploring the entangled relationships between humans and non-human intelligences.
She earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2024 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture the same year. Rcently, she completed a Dance Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division, culminating in a lecture at their annual dance symposium. Her work has been presented at MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, Mercer Union, Karma International, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Learn more at her website.
How To Gut A Fish... (2023)
Vanity Set (Waiting To Exhale) (2022)
In The Belly Of The Cave (2024)
Honeymoon (2024)