Dr. Yaoundé Olu is a painter, curator, indie comics publisher, musician, author, alternative sciences research specialist and former principal of a high school for the arts. She owned and operated Osun Center for the Arts in Chicago from 1968 – 1982. She is an award-winning editorial cartoonist with the Crusader Newspaper Group, and was recently featured in a New York Times bestseller; It’s Life As I See It; Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940-1980, published to accompany an exhibit featuring some of her work at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Other exhibit venues include the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum; the Noyes Cultural Arts Center; the Evanston Art Center; the Chicago Cultural Center; the Tubman Museum; the University of Illinois African American Cultural Center; South Shore Cultural Center; Heaven Gallery; Sapphire & Crystals exhibits and the Bridgeport Art Center to name a few. She is featured in the new book Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties. She is also featured in a 2022 Carnegie Hall Afrofuturism Podcast curated by Ytasha Womack, and spoke on the topic “Back to the Future: An Afrofuturist Vision” at Pigment International’s Artist on the 9ine. Dr. Olu represented the American Midwest at Festac 77, the 2nd World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria, and she is founder/artistic director of the band Drum Divas.

Dr. Olu holds a BS in Education from Illinois Teachers College, Chicago South, an MA in Fine and Performing Arts from Governors State University, and a PhD in Health Sciences/Holistic Medicine from the Union Institute.