Biography

Eugene Ofori Agyei is a Ghanaian-born artist and educator living in New York. He graduated from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, with a BA in Industrial Art, majoring in Ceramics, in 2018. Agyei received his MFA with honors from the University of Florida. He is the 2020–2021 University of Florida Grinter Fellowship recipient and the 2023 Harold Garde Graduate Studio Art Award. He was nominated for the 2022 and 2023 Outstanding Master’s and Professional International Student Awards at the University of Florida.

The artist has shown his work in both group and solo exhibitions across Florida as well as in Maine, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Ohio, Virginia, Connecticut, California and New York. Internationally, his work has been exhibited in Turkey and recently attracted the attention of prominent German art collector Franz, Duke of Bavaria, who acquired three of Agyei’s works and has ultimately committed to place them in museums. Agyei had his first solo museum exhibition at the Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Orlando, and was recently shown  in group exhibitions at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, California, and the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

Agyei also receives the 2022 National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts (NCECA) Graduate Student Fellowship, the 2022 NCECA Multicultural Fellowship award, and the Best of Show from The In Art Gallery’s social change and open theme exhibition. Also completed artist residencies at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts on the 2021 Zenobia Award and at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine on the 2022 Artaxis Fellowship.

In April 2022, the Morean Arts Center named him as one of its Fresh Squeezed 6: Emerging Artists in Florida. He is the winner of the Pathways 2022: Carlos Malamud Prize at the University of Central Florida Gallery and Rollins Museum of Art, which comes with a $10,000 prize. Agyei is the recipient of the 2023-2026 Robert Chapman Turner Teaching Fellowship in Ceramic Art at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

He is represented by the Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery in Stamford, CT.