Email me at reginaagu.studio at gmail.com
Bio
Regina Agu (American, b. Houston) is a visual artist, writer, and researcher based in Chicago, IL. Agu was raised between the United States, the Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland. Her interdisciplinary practice includes conceptual and material inquiries into memory, history, representation, and Black geographies. Her research-based practice spans photography, drawing, installation, sound, text, and collaboration in the public sphere.
Her work has been included in exhibitions, performances, and publications internationally, at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Museum, The Drawing Center, the High Line, Project Row Houses, FotoFest, the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, among many others. Her work was exhibited in the 2021 Atlanta Biennial: Of Care and Destruction, and the 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon.
Agu is a recipient of a 2025 Creative Impact Award from United States Artists, supported by the Joyce Foundation. She is a 2023 Joyce Award winner with MoCP. Her work has been supported by an Artadia Houston award, grants from Houston Arts Alliance, The Idea Fund, and the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research project A Psychogeography of Emancipation Park. Agu was a 2022 Radicle artist-in-residence in the Jackman Goldwasser Residency at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL. She has attended residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans through a partnership with For Freedoms, A Studio in the Woods, Open Sessions at The Drawing Center in NYC, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Lawndale Artist Studio Program, among others.
From 2014-2017, Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, an artist-run space in Third Ward, Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Agu is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her other collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park, which was supported by an Idea Fund grant in 2014. Agu‘s advocacy for artists in the Gulf South spanned serving on the board of directors of several arts organizations in Houston, including Project Row Houses, Aurora Picture Show, and DiverseWorks (including a concurrent term as Artist Board President), serving as a mentor to the Project Row Houses Summer Studios program, and jurying grant panels across Texas and in New Orleans.
Agu holds a BS from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in private and public collections including Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.