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“I am intrigued by the horror of personhood: that one's humanity is contingent on a set of rules, that if you can be ‘dehumanized’ there must also be a ‘humanizing.’
We must become human.”
Maud Acheampong (they/them) is a Ghanaian-American New Media Performance artist based in Baltimore and New York interested in misery, ugliness, nostalgia, monstrosity and the way they manifest in our digital ecologies – for better or worse. Through Dainty Funk, their digital avatar and horror drag persona, Acheampong takes on bright, monstrous forms, chronicling these phenomena through a new media lens. Dainty Funk is that moment of connectivity– between beauty and beast, art and science, technology and feeling. They reject the construct of ‘humanity,’ naming the digital as a site through which ‘human-like’ artificial intelligence reflects the dehumanization embedded in an already racialized technology. These works manifest through performance, self portrait video, site specific projection installations, sculpture, video essay, and publication contending with where we must go when we are denied our humanity.
Acheampong received their MFA in Digital Interdisciplinary Art Practice at the City College of New York (CCNY) and is a Year 10 incubator member at NEW INC. They have recently completed their first solo show Blue Dark and in the Shape of Me and their accompanying live performance A Yawn, A Scream, an Endless Opening of the mouth at the CCNY planetarium– one of three planetariums in Manhattan. They have been awarded a residency at Monson Arts through CCNY and will be joining the cohort this October in Monson Maine. A new version of their vitrine sculpture The Thing Inside of You will be presented in LaJuné McNillian’s Black Movement Library in 2026.
Their work has appeared in The Vibe Room, Sissy Anarchy, Mixed Mag, and Vogue.