Keli Safia Maksud

Keli Safia Maksud is a Kenyan-Tanzanian-Canadian-Muslim-Christian visual artist and writer based in New York. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory, Maksud’s interdisciplinary practice favours the liminal space between fixed identities and works towards destabilising received histories in order to expose fictions of the state.

Maksud earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice and an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been included in the Bamako Biennial (2019), National Museum of Contemporary Art -Seoul (2018), and Galería Nueva (2020). More recently, she has featured in several international exhibitions, including;  A different now is close enough to exhale on you, Goodman Gallery, South Africa (2022), Notes from Below, ACUD Gallery, Berlin (2023), Contact Zone, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York (2023), and Smack Mellon, New York (2025), among others.