Iké Udé

Photographer Iké Udé was born on July 27, 1964 in Lagos, Nigeria to Samuel Obe Udé-Agu and Cecilia Nnemembchi Udé-Agu. He graduated from Government Secondary School, Afikpo in Afikpo, Nigeria. In 1981, he began his studies in media communications at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Udé worked as an artist in the 1980s, with a focus on photography. In 1994, Udé created his photographic series Cover Girl. The following year, he founded aRUDE Magazine, an art-fashion print magazine, and his work was featured in the book Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Iké Udé, published by the MIT Press in 2000. In 2008, Udé published his book Style File: The World’s Most Elegantly Dressed with HarperCollins. That same year, his series Paris Hilton: Fantasy and Simulacrum was featured in the Stux Gallery in New York City and in the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway, in 2009. Udé then created his photographic series on dandyism, Sartorial Anarchy, which was displayed in The Global Africa Project exhibit at the Museum of Art & Design (MAD) in New York, New York, from 2010 to 2013, and in the Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion exhibit at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum in 2013. A selection of Udé’s self-portraits from his Sartorial Anarchy series was exhibited in a solo exhibition, Style and Sympathies, at the Leila Heller Gallery in New York City in 2013.

Udé created a series of portraits titled Nollywood Portraits between 2014 and 2016, photographing major figures in Nigeria’s Nollywood movie industry. His Nollywood Portraits were the focus of the book Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty and were displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in 2022. Udé’s photography has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, including the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 2025, Udé served as a special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibit.

Throughout his career, Udé has received numerous awards and honors including on Vanity Fair magazine’s “Best Dressed” list in 2009, 2012, and 2015. He was inducted into the Best Dressed Hall of Fame in 2022.

Udé resides in New York, New York.

Iké Udé was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 18, 2023.