Ayodeji Ogunnaike, Ph.D.

About the Author

Ayodeji Ogunnaike, Ph.D. is the Assistant Professor of African Religions at McGill University. His research focuses mostly on Yoruba oriṣa worship in Nigeria, but also addresses Islam in Africa, Christianity in Africa, and diaspora religions—Brazilian Candomblé in particular. Having studied Ifa divination with a high priest and diviner in Nigeria, he has a keen interest in indigenous African intellectual traditions and mythology. He is the author of the forthcoming How Worship Becomes Religion (forthcoming with Duke university Press) and is currently developing and curating an online library of Ifa orature. He lives in Montreal, Canada.
Oludamini Ogunnaike, Ph.D. is the Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at The University of Virginia. His research examines the philosophical and artistic dimensions of postcolonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa, especially Sufism and Ifa. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020), winner of the Outstanding First Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020). He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Data Oruwari, also known as 'The Ancestors' Scribe,' is a Nigerian-born, Virginia-based visionary artist whose work channels divine intelligence and ancestral wisdom. Working primarily in pen & ink, and gold leaf, her iconographic style, marked by meticulous detail and symbolic depth, explores Afro-spiritual cosmology and the interconnectedness of the spiritual and material realms. She lives in Virginia.