Olakunle Adewale
Olakunle Adewale is a Social Entrepreneur and Visual Artist, known for integrating and promoting arts in the healthcare sector. He is the Founder and Creative Art Director of Tender Arts Nigeria, a social enterprise and non-profit focused on therapeutic arts, art education, art advocacy, community empowerment, talent development and civic engagement. Olakunle has over 10 years’ experience in utilizing creative arts as a platform for talent discovery and community development.
Olakunle holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine and Applied Arts from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria and studied Civic Leadership at Tulane University, New Orleans.
Olakunle’s works centre around therapeutic arts, with emphasis on improving health and health-related outcomes. So far, he has impacted more than 15, 000 people via his art programmes in Nigeria, Asia and the United States.
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Through Tender Arts Nigeria, which he founded in 2013, Olakunle alongside his team provides multimodal interventions that combine aesthetic engagement, imagination, sensory approval, evocative emotions, and cognitive stimulations to support and reduce the symptoms of people living with sickle cell anaemia, dementia, cerebral palsy, and other mental ailments. Olakunle’s goal aligns with the Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG), to ‘ensure healthy lives and promote the well-being of all, via arts-based interventions.’
At Tender Arts Nigeria, Olakunle has spearheaded several Arts in Medicine Projects in Nigeria and other African countries such as Tanzania, Namibia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa. Most of these programs are focused on transforming the healthcare experiences of patients, caregivers and their families, by incorporating arts; paintings, drawings, expressive writing and poetry.
One of his projects include founding the Arts in Medicine Fellowship (AIMP) in 2018, a short-term project that focused on the engagement of healthcare professionals in arts, in order to help integrate arts into hospitals.
From 2015-2017, Olakunle served as the International Programme Director of ICEHA’s Healing Through Art (HTA) Project for survivors of Boko Haram insurgency and their families in North-East, Nigeria. Other projects also include Artitude, a therapeutic art-based intervention for girls in correctional facilities, Africa4her and Artbility. These projects were art-based interventions that leveraged arts as an expressive tool against gender-based violence and inequalities.
For his achievements, Olakunle Adewale was named Young African Ambassador for Art and Culture in 2015. He also received the Commonwealth Youth Award for West Africa region in 2016 and was named among JCI Ten Outstanding Persons of Nigeria. In 2018, Olakunle was named an international Advocate for persons living with Sickle Cell Anemia. In 2019, he was the World Bank Social Inclusion Hero from Nigeria and an Atlantic Fellow of Global Brain Health Institute, University of California.
In recognition of his contribution to the United States in both fields of arts and medicine, the Mayor of Cincinnati, John Cranley declared the 2nd of August 2019 ‘Kunle Adewale Day’, in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
Olakunle is a member of Art Therapy without Borders Inc. and functions as the Nigerian representative for Arts in Health Early Career Research Network, University College London.