AGE: 27
BASED IN: Baltimore and New York
Even before Maud Acheampong had their first solo show, the Ghanaian-American artist had accrued hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok. Their theatrical, reference-laden videos—which they perform as Dainty Funk, a digital avatar and drag persona—use social- media vernacular to meditate on heady subjects like surveillance and monstrousness. But their work takes on a different resonance in carefully chosen IRL settings like the Marshak Planetarium at City College of New York, where the artist performed earlier this year.
Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist.
A Yawn, A Scream, An Endless Opening of the Mouth, 2025, is a live performance piece that was presented at the CCNY Planetarium. The work features a compilation of videos of myself, filmed, directed, and edited by myself over the course of two years, accompanied by a spoken collection of personal writings about the end of the world projected onto the planetarium’s dome screen. I stared up at my past selves in a place we’d typically gather to stare up at the stars—to witness our small lives in the context of galaxies, quake at my own fear of God, and find peace in sharing those fears with people who might’ve been just as scared as me. It made me less afraid.
Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?
I’m heading to Ghana to the plot of land my mom bought for my sister and I in the southernmost part of Akosombo in the Asuogyaman District and building an obsidian, Vantablack dome whose floor is covered with the red powder of crushed cochineal beetles. I would film me and a group of fetish priests entering the dome in all-white ceremonial garments, dancing inside the dome, kicking up the red powder with our feet in the midst of ritual, and exiting the dome with our white garments turned red. Then, I would project the film on the inside and preserve the footprints of our dance with 3D-scanned molds.
What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?
I love a comically large, full-length body mirror. In my live performances, it can be hard to remember my own body and its habits, so watching myself in the mirror gives mundane, untrained body movements more clarity and allows me to make those movements more precise.
See CULTURED‘s full 2025 Young Artists list and access other individual artist profiles here.
in your life?
