Minna Salami is an award-winning Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish author, speaker, and social critic based in London.
She is currently an Open Society Ideas Workshop Fellow and formerly Programme Chair and Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE. Her work offers new creative, embodied and multilayered ways of understanding power, society, and how we live together — what she has called sensuous knowledge.
She is the author of Can Feminism Be African?: A Most Paradoxical Question (HarperCollins, 2025) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury, 2020), with her books translated into multiple languages and inspiring courses, lecture series and artistic work internationally.
As Programme Chair and later Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE in Hamburg, Minna convened distinguished global thinkers to consider new pluralist responses to the systemic challenges of our time. Her work also involves curating, programming and collaborations with cultural institutions and think tanks. She was Creative Director of the short film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis, which received a 2024 Lovie Award for public service.
She publishes Kaleido, a publication exploring society, ideas and culture through a multi-perspectival lens.
Her writing has appeared in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Ideas Letter and Project Syndicate, and she lectures at the New School of the Anthropocene and internationally.
