Founding director, African Digital Art, Nairobi
When she first started making digital art, Jepchumba identified ‘an absence of any awareness of what was going on in the continent’ of Africa, spurring her to create the website African Digital Art in 2009. The site presents works of animation, AR/VR, digital painting and gaming – but more than that, it functions as an online collective for digital artists from Cairo to Johannesburg, allowing them to forge connections and find support for their practice. The website includes a comprehensive directory of galleries and studio spaces across the continent as well as a host of artist interviews and process tutorials. Among more than 1,000 users are the renowned South African sculptor Nandipha Mntambo and the Nairobi-based photographer Osborne Macharia; they and many others provide explanations and analyses of their work, freely available on the site. As an artist working across film, animation and design, Jepchumba focuses on the cultural representation of Black people around the world.