Philip Kwame Boafo is a theatre and performance studies scholar, movement maker, and performance curator working at the intersections of ritual, religion, embodied knowledge, and African cultural expression. He holds an MA in Intercultural Communication Studies from the Shanghai Theatre Academy and a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore.
His research examines religious processions in Accra, Ghana, as sensuous and performative archives through which memory, knowledge, and social relations are produced and transmitted beyond text-based epistemologies. His broader interests include performance ethnography, ritual studies, archival epistemologies, and sensory methodologies in African and diasporic contexts.
Alongside his scholarly work, Boafo maintains an active creative practice as a movement maker and performance curator. He employs his body and everyday objects as living archives to interrogate commercial histories, environmental degradation, and the politics of consumption, bridging ethnography, design thinking, and creative praxis. His performances, workshops, and participatory projects have been presented internationally, foregrounding embodied and sensorial ways of knowing.
Boafo was the inaugural Prof. Ian H. Munro Fellow at the Library of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD), where he explored ritual as an aesthetic and political technology in African and diasporic cultural and literary production. He was also one of three finalists for the Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion in 2024, awarded by the Institute of Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University, and has been nominated for the Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize for Best Ph.D. Thesis in the Humanities and Social Sciences at NUS (2024).
As a Spring 2026 fellow of the Restitution and Reparation: Africa and the Post-Colonial Condition fellowship at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Boafo examines the ritual afterlives of restituted sacred objects, focusing on how return generates new performances, obligations, and forms of recolonization within postcolonial African contexts.
