Modupeola Fadugba (b. 1985, Lomé, Togo) is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose paintings and socially engaged installations bring together art, mathematics, economics, and social history. Although self-taught as an artist, she holds degrees in chemical engineering and economics from the University of Delaware and a master’s degree in education from Harvard University.

Fadugba is best known for her images of synchronized swimmers, in which water becomes a metaphor for survival, competition, collective strength, and social belonging. These works also examine the historical exclusion of Black communities from public swimming facilities and the continued underrepresentation of Black figures within Western visual culture. Her distinctive technique combines acrylic, ink, graphite, oil, and gold leaf with carefully burned paper or canvas. The scorched surfaces evoke vulnerability, trauma, and the possibility of transformation.

Fadugba received the Grand Prize of the Senegalese Minister of Culture at the 2016 Dakar Biennale and presented a solo project at The Armory Show in New York in 2023. Her work is held by the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Minneapolis Institute of Art, University of Delaware, Sindika Dokolo Foundation, and the Tiroche Collection.

Several months before our departure from Togo, my parents told my siblings and me that we would be moving to America. I was five years old and had not heard much about America before that point. In fact, my only reference was the green dollar notes my father earned from freelance interpreter jobs at the United Nations. They were quite the departure from the colorful Togolese francs I had grown to trust as valuable.
I studied the green-tinted old white man on the front, and the green pyramids on the back. I concluded that America would be a green place. Not green in the figurative American dream sense - I literally assumed that the sky, buildings, people, and clothes would appear as if viewed behind a green filter. It turns out, (as in the case where I believed the world was flat); I came to some radical conclusions about the world in my early years. These days, as I explore concepts of value, my paper coins bring to remembrance, my earliest understandings of worth.