Obiora Udechukwu is a painter, printmaker, draughtsman and poet, and one of the central figures of the Nsukka School. He started at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, but moved to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka after the 1966 anti-Igbo violence in the north. During the Biafran war he worked in the Biafran propaganda unit. He finished his BA at Nsukka in 1972 with a thesis on Igbo uli wall painting and an MFA in 1977. He then taught at Nsukka for about twenty-five years and became Professor of Painting in 1986. In 1997 he was appointed Dana Professor of Fine Arts at St. Lawrence University in New York, and he retired in 2018. His work is built on line. He took the spare, flowing linework of uli body and wall painting and nsibidi signs and used them to comment sharply on Nigerian society: war refugees, military rule, corruption, and the daily struggles of ordinary people. He works in ink drawings, watercolours, etchings and oils, often with flat areas of strong colour. He helped found the Aka Circle of Exhibiting Artists and sat on the board of Chinua Achebe's journal Okike. His poetry collection What the Madman Said won the ANA Poetry Prize in 1990. Among the artists he taught at Nsukka are Tayo Adenaike, Olu Oguibe and Chika Okeke-Agulu.
School or movement: Nsukka School / Uli revival (Natural Synthesis lineage); Aka Circle of Exhibiting Artists.
Influenced by Uli mural and body painting (Agulu), Nsibidi script, Uche Okeke and Natural Synthesis, Biafran war experience.
Influenced Tayo Adenaike, Olu Oguibe, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Marcia Kure, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie.
