Achile Tenkiang

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Achille is a writer, strategist, and producer whose work is guided by the conviction that storytelling is a form of place-making. Shaped by years lived between Douala and Dublin, Paris and Cape Town, Nairobi and now Brooklyn, he approaches culture as a conversation across geographies—attentive to the soundscapes, textiles, kinships, and archives that carry Black life forward. His practice moves fluidly among poetry, criticism, philanthropy, and curation, seeking to map the routes through which memory travels and communities imagine themselves anew. Achille is the founder and director of the Baldwin Institute, a nonprofit inspired by James Baldwin’s legacy and dedicated to nurturing creative futures for Black and Brown artists, thinkers, and organizers. He previously served as a grantmaker at the Mellon Foundation, managing a $58 million portfolio supporting art, cultural heritage, public memory, and Black Atlantic scholarship. His writing has appeared in Vogue, Rolling Stone, and the BBC, and he has presented work at venues including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the U.S. Embassy in France. He sits on the boards of the Delaware Art Museum, JACK Arts, and the Mondiant Initiative. Based in Brooklyn, Achille works across disciplines and diasporas—curating intimate supper clubs, seeding cultural infrastructure, and writing toward memory. He remains interested in how stories land in the world and in the possibilities they open for more generous, liberated futures.