Rosa-Johan Uddoh
Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary artist and writer exploring Black self-formation through a Black feminist lens. She works across performance, film, installation, writing and print.
Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary artist exploring self-formation, through a Black feminist lens.
Rosa’s book Practice Makes Perfect, an experimental coming-of-age story, was published by Book Works and Focal Point Gallery in 2022.
Rosa has exhibited internationally including at Pioneer Works, Amant, Bergen Kunsthall & Tate. She was Amant NY Researcher-in-Residence 2025, Stuart Hall Library Resident 2020 and shortlisted for the Jarman Award, 2022.
Rosa’s performance ‘NATIVITY’ (2023) was the first performance collected by the Women's Art Collection. She presented her paper ‘Pedagogy & The Politics of Self-Esteem in British Black Supplementary Schools' at the 2026 American Educational Research Association.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
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Research interests
Through performance, pedagogy, film, installation, writing & print, Rosa explores the effect of popular culture on Black self-formation. This includes exploring Black performance across ‘culture’ (art, sport, everyday life); how characters like St Balthazar, Venus Williams, Una Marson and Moira Stuart perform, and so produce, Blackness.
Rosa is interested in how different types of Black performance are encouraged at different times, the limits and consequences of ‘representation’; and how different scripts might prompt us toward freedom.
Engaging archival research, nostalgia & humour, she aims to tap into a place in herself, participants and audience that’s deeply-felt and politically charged.
Practice
In her practice, Rosa blends archival research with comedy & satire to communicate complex issues. She often collaborates with a range of people often excluded from Art including: children, the elderly & hospital patients, but also actors, activists and finance bros, to unpack the institutions of state, school & work shape that us all.
Through her practice she creates spaces of active audience participation and collective knowledge-production, through laughter, shouting-at-the-screen and the throwing of sweet treats. Inspired by cultural studies, she takes popular culture seriously as a way to interrogate power & engage intergenerational audiences. Navigating through autobiography, public nostalgia & history as it exists in the popular imagination (‘ye olde’), she aims to tap into a place in people that’s deeply-felt and politically-charged.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Uddoh, Rosa-Johan. (2022). Practice Makes Perfect. London & Southend-on-Sea: Book Works and Focal Point Gallery, 144p.