Achille Tenkiang | Board Member
Hi, I’m Achille (Cameroon, 1995)—a writer, strategist and producer guided by the belief that storytelling is a form of place-making.
Over the years, I’ve lived between cities and continents—Douala and Dublin, Paris and Cape Town, Nairobi and now Brooklyn—each offering a different texture of Black life. Douala and Dublin speak in different colonial tongues. Paris forgets what Cape Town remembers. Nairobi hums. Brooklyn builds. Across these geographies, I follow the soundscapes, textiles, kinships, and archives that carry us forward. Through poetry and philanthropy, criticism and curation, I try to map those routes.
I am the founder and director of the Baldwin Institute, a nonprofit rooted in James Baldwin’s legacy and committed to nurturing creative futures for Black and Brown artists, thinkers, and organizers. Previously, I was a grantmaker at the Mellon Foundation, where I managed $58 million across more than 100 grants in art, cultural heritage, public memory, and the Black Atlantic. My writing has appeared in Vogue, Rolling Stone, and the BBC. I’ve shared work at the Schomburg Center and the U.S. Embassy in France.
Now based in Brooklyn, I move across disciplines and diasporas—curating supper clubs, seeding cultural infrastructure, and writing toward memory. I’m interested in how stories travel, where they land, and what they make possible.