Minna Salami is an author, thinker and programme director exploring knowledge, power and culture through African thought, feminist perspectives and sensuous knowledge.
Minna Salami is a Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish author, thinker and programme director. She is an Open Society Ideas Workshop Fellow and Programme Director at the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland. She was formerly Senior Fellow and Programme Chair at THE NEW INSTITUTE.
She is the author of Can Feminism Be African?: A Most Paradoxical Question (Harper Collins, 2025) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury 2020) with her books translated into multiple languages. She was Creative Director of the short film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis, winner of a 2024 Lovie Award, and her books have inspired numerous workshops, courses and art exhibitions.
A leading voice in contemporary feminism, Salami drew more than a million readers to her multiple award-winning blog MsAfropolitan.com, which she ran from 2010 to 2025. She now writes Kaleido, a publication about society, ideas and culture through a multi-perspectival lens.
Her essays have appeared in the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Ideas Letter and Project Syndicate, and she regularly delivers lectures internationally on platforms ranging from TEDx and Yale University to the European Commission and NASA’s Singularity University.
Her practice encompasses writing, lecturing, curating, convening and advisory work with institutions internationally. As Programme Chair at THE NEW INSTITUTE, she led an international interdisciplinary programme bringing together thinkers and practitioners across fields. She has curated public programmes at the V&A and collaborated with major museums, academic institutions, think tanks, governmental bodies and cultural organisations internationally. Her work has also provided the conceptual basis for artistic projects and exhibitions, including an upcoming exhibition at Amos Rex inspired by the Finnish translation of Sensuous Knowledge.
Salami is a Full Member of the Club of Rome and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. She serves on the advisory boards of the African Feminist Initiative, Cambridge Studies in Public Humanities and Feminist Studies, as well as on the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
An alumna of Lund University and SOAS University of London, Salami has lived in Nigeria, Sweden, Spain, New York and Hamburg. She now lives in London.