Bunmi Agusto (b. 1999, Lagos) is a world-builder and storyteller concerned with unseen worlds and their metaphysical architectures. Moving across dreams, folktales, imagined realms, lost civilisations, cosmologies, and theories of the afterlife, she constructs rational systems for what might otherwise appear irrational and maps the hidden mechanics that underlie reality.
In her drawings of her paracosm Within, the interior world becomes a vast repository for everything she encounters in her waking life. She reimagines personal, cultural, and philosophical concerns through the vibrant lens of her identity as a Nigerian woman of Yoruba, Edo, and Afro-Brazilian descent. As a world “in her head,” Within held together by hair, which functions as the underlying nervous system upon which the entire realm is built—an organic architecture forming root-like networks that transmit memory, emotion, and consciousness across its landscape.
As a writer and art historian, Agusto thinks critically about fantasy and magical storytelling, often weaving together scientific theories, global mythologies, and contemporary narratives. Through this interdisciplinary lens, she positions the fantastical not as escape, but as a method of inquiry that reveals the coded structures shaping both inner and outer worlds.
Her writing practice is primarily self-published on her Substack ‘In Search of Magic’ where she explores fantasy and magical storytelling, both ancient and contemporary. She explores comparative mythology, often cross-referencing myth and folktales with scientific theories. She has contributed essays to DADA Magazine as well as the 2025 Nigerian Pavilion for the London Design Biennale, for which she was brought on as a Cultural Collaborator. Following her research and writing on The Remediation of Egúngún Masquerades in Contemporary Nigerian Art, she curated the exhibition 'Masking the Unseen’ at MILIKI, Lagos in 2022 highlighting contemporary remediations of mask traditions as a modes of capturing intangible essences.
She holds an MFA in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, an MA in History of Art & Archaeology from SOAS University, and a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. Her artworks have been exhibited in Nigeria, the UK, the US, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and China. She has curated both historical and contemporary exhibitions as well as consulted for television, theatre and fashion projects. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Financial Times, Condé Nast Traveller and Boy.Brother.Friend. In 2023, Agusto was selected as one of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. She was also awarded the Mansfield-Ruddock Prize in 2023, the Clarendon Scholarship in 2022 and the Cass Art Prize twice in 2019 and 2020.
She is also an avid gamer and credits games like The Sims and The Legend of Zelda for sparking her love of world-building. Her fascination with world-building extends outside of fantastical contexts and into the realm of architecture. As an architecture enthusiast and researcher, she collaborated with Young Aspiring Nigerian Architects (YANA) to create a website that acts as a digital resource for Nigerian and West African architectural history.