Efie Gallery
Artists, curatorial team, advisors, and partners connected to Efie Gallery.
Founders
Gallery founders and founding directors.
Valentina Mintah
Valentina Mintah is a Ghanaian-British technology executive and the co-founder of Efie Gallery, which she established in Dubai with her two sons. Her primary career is in global trade technology: she sits on the executive board of the International Chamber of Commerce and has built a reputation in digital trade and supply-chain systems, a world away from the gallery floor. That background informs Efie's ambitions as an international bridge-builder between African art and new markets. Bringing her family's Ghanaian heritage and her own executive experience to the venture, she co-founded Efie in 2021 as a platform to give African artists — established and emerging, from the continent and its diaspora — a serious home in the Gulf, and to foster exchange between African and Middle Eastern cultures.
Kwame Mintah
Kwame Mintah is a co-founder of Efie Gallery and one of the driving forces behind its programme. An art collector who was still a university student when the gallery launched, he conceived the project with his brother Kobi out of a shared passion for collecting — beginning, unexpectedly, with records rather than visual art. Their idea of exhibiting a vinyl collection at Dubai's All Africa Festival in 2021, on the conviction that records are among the richest of art forms, grew into Efie Gallery and its companion Rekord Gallery. Since then Kwame has helped shape a roster spanning El Anatsui, James Barnor, Yaw Owusu, Isshaq Ismail, Slawn, Maggie Otieno and others, articulating the gallery's mission as a bridge between high-value African art and the Middle East, and championing Dubai as the right launchpad for that vision.
Kobi Mintah
Kobi Mintah is a photographer, filmmaker and co-founder of Efie Gallery, which he launched alongside his mother Valentina and brother Kwame. His background in image-making informs the visual and curatorial sensibility of the gallery, and he was central to its unusual genesis: the plan he and Kwame developed to exhibit their record collection at the All Africa Festival, framing vinyl as a layered art form of cover, liner notes and sound. That project became Efie Gallery and its companion Rekord Gallery, the record-collectors' space Kobi helped establish a floor above the main gallery. As a co-founder he has helped guide Efie's growth into an internationally recognised platform for contemporary African art and its diaspora.