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In the words of The Guardian, he "has secured a reputation as one of the UK’s most pioneering film-makers [whose] poetic works have grappled with race, identity and post-colonial attitudes for over three decades."

Akomfrah was named Artist of the Year in the 2018 Apollo Magazine Awards.

Purple (2017), a 62-minute, six-screen video installation commissioned for the prominent Curve Gallery space at the Barbican, London, Akomfrah describes as "a response to [the] Anthropocene". A tie-in series of film screenings comprising selections made by Akomfrah was held from October 2017 at the Barbican Cinema. The installation travelled to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden; the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art; and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon.

In 2017, Akomfrah won the biennial Artes Mundi prize, the UK's biggest award for international art, having been chosen for the award for his "substantial body of outstanding work dealing with issues of migration, racism and religious persecution", including his work Auto Da Fé. Akomfrah said of his winning two-screen video installation, which explores the theme of mass migration over a 400-year period: "I wanted to focus on the fact that many people have to leave because something terrible is happening, it’s not just about leaving for a better life, many people feel they have to leave to have a life at all."

He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to art and film making.

His 2015 work, Vertigo Sea, is a three-screen film installation that was shown at the 56th Venice Biennale in May 2015. Vertigo Sea premiered in the UK at the Arnolfini in Bristol (16 January – 10 April 2016) coinciding with an exhibition of new and recent work by Akomfrah being shown at the Lisson Gallery.

In October 2016 his 40-minute two-screen video installation Auto Da Fé, filmed in Barbados and inspired by the theme of 400 years of migration and religious persecution, went on show in Cardiff.

Akomfrah has had solo presentations at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden (2015), Broad Art Museum, East Lansing (2014), Tate Britain, London (2013), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2012), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011) and the British Film Institute, in the BFI Gallery (2010).

Akomfrah has taught multiple courses at an academic institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, New York University, Westminster University, Princeton University. A tri-campus three-day event entitled "Cinematic Translations: The Work of John Akomfrah" was held in November 2013 at the University of Toronto, where he was artist-in-residence. A Harvard Film Archive critique of his work states: "Akomfrah has become a cinematic counterpart to such commentators of and contributors to the culture of the Black diaspora as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Greg Tate and Henry Louis Gates. In doing so, he has continued to mine the audiovisual archive of the 20th century, recontextualizing these images not only by selecting and juxtaposing them but also through the addition of eloquent and allusive text."

In 2013 his major work The Unfinished Conversation, a multi-layered installation, was shown in Tate Britain for six months in 2013, and was acquired for the National Collection.

Akomfrah was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours for services to the film industry. In March 2012, he was awarded the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margaret Award. In 2013 he was awarded honorary doctorates from University of the Arts London and from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Portsmouth University, the reformed polytechnic from which he had graduated in 1982.

From 2001 to 2007 he served as a Governor of the British Film Institute. From 2004 to 2013 he served as a governor of the film organisation Film London.

In 1998, together with Lina Gopaul and David Lawson, his long-term producing partners, Akomfrah co-founded Smoking Dogs Films.

A founder of the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982, he made his début as a director with Handsworth Songs, which examined the fallout from the 1985 Handsworth riots. Handsworth Songs went on to win the Grierson Award for Best Documentary in 1987.

In 1982, he was one of the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective, which was active until 1998, dedicated towards examining issues of Black British identity through film and media. Handsworth Songs, the first documentary produced by the collective, with Akomfrah as director, focused on racial tensions in Britain in the 1980s. Incorporating archive material and newsreel, and making experimental use of sound, Handsworth Songs won seven international awards, among them the BFI John Grierson Award for Best Documentary.

John Akomfrah was born in Accra, Ghana. His parents were involved with the anti-colonial activism. In an interview with Sukhdev Sandhu, Akomfrah said: "My dad was a member of the cabinet of Kwame Nkrumah's party.... We left Ghana because my mum's life was in danger after the coup of 1966, and my father died in part because of the struggle that led up to the coup." Living in Britain since the age of four, Akomfrah was educated at schools in West London and at Portsmouth Polytechnic, where he graduated in Sociology in 1982.

John Akomfrah, CBE (born 4 May 1957) is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films".