Minna Salami
Minna Salami
Minna Salami is a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish author, public intellectual, and programme chair based in London. Her work is particularly known for developing sensuous and kaleidoscopic approaches to knowledge, power, and social transformation. Through feminist philosophy, cultural criticism, and contemporary political thought, she offers new ways of understanding power, society, and how we live together.
She is the author of Can Feminism Be African?: A Most Paradoxical Question (HarperCollins, 2025) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury, 2020), which has been translated into multiple languages and inspired courses and lecture series internationally. Her books are known for developing original concepts that bring together feminism, philosophy, and political thought in bold and accessible ways.
As Programme Chair and later Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE in Hamburg, Minna convened distinguished global thinkers to consider new pluralist responses to the systemic challenges of our time. She was also the creative director of the short film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis, which received a 2024 Lovie Award for public service.
Her essays have appeared in the Financial Times, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, The Philosopher, and The Ideas Letter, and she regularly lectures at platforms and institutions ranging from The Institute of Art and Ideas and TEDx to Yale University, the European Commission, and Singularity University at NASA.
From 2010 to 2025, Minna drew over a million readers to her multiple award-winning blog MsAfropolitan. She now writes Kaleido: The Europatriarchy Files on Substack, a project rethinking contemporary political and cultural life through kaleidoscopic perspectives.
Minna is a Full Member of the Club of Rome, a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader, and serves on the advisory boards of the African Feminist Initiative, Cambridge Studies in Public Humanities, and Feminist Studies. She also sits on the council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
An alumna of Lund University and SOAS University of London, Minna has lived in Nigeria, Sweden, Spain, New York, and Hamburg. Her work reflects this transnational background, bringing African and European intellectual traditions into critical and imaginative dialogue.
