I’m a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller using photography, poetry, and film to archive Black life as ritual, resistance, and radical imagination. Rooted in the South Side of Chicago and shaped by global Black traditions, my work centers memory, movement, and the sacred beauty of everyday survival.
BIO:
Antonio Foli (formerly kwabena foli) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, filmmaker, and scholar born in Belgium and raised on the South Side of Chicago. His work spans poetry, digital collage, cinema, and academic research, all rooted in a deep exploration of Black interiority, masculinity, mental health, and ancestral memory.
He is the author of three major poetry collections: learning rhythm (Flowered Concrete), a lyrical biomyth rooted in journaling and healing pedagogy; ON GOD (Candor Arts), a visceral portrait of urban spirituality and street language; and THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO SAY OUR NAME, a self-published collection confronting grief, race, and bipolar disorder type-II through a distinctly Black lens. His poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, Salt Hill, Cream City Review, and others. He has performed nationally as a Chicago Poetry Slam Champion and appeared at venues and platforms such as the All Def Poetry and the Green Mill.
Foli’s visual/digital work blends photography, design, and collage into ritualized archives—most notably in series like god gives rest/not sleep, blk excellence, and juke. His triptychs and digital altars have been exhibited at Seerveld Gallery, Elastic Arts, Chicago Artist Coalition and have been shared over 400 million times online. His aesthetic centers lo-fi techniques, ancestral rhythm, and spiritual narrative—honoring Black grief, celebration, and stillness as sacred acts.
His cinematic debut, Rise of the Tiger, is a psychological martial arts horror film set in 1969 Harlem. Told in stark black and white, it explores trauma, hallucination, and obsession through the descent of a prodigious fighter. The film expands on his written work’s themes—dissecting legacy, delusion, and the metaphysical cost of becoming a legend.
Foli holds a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Communication Studies from Southern Illinois University. He’s also held residencies at Ragdale, Banff Centre for Arts, and the Poetry Center of Chicago. His academic interests include Black media theory, trauma representation, spiritual poetics, and performance as pedagogy. He has served as a teaching artist, workshop facilitator, and cultural worker in both academic and community spaces, weaving scholarship with creativity and ritual.
Across form and field, Antonio Foli creates work that is devotional, interrogative, and deeply human.