Yoruba mythology stories of the Orisa from West Africa and the Diaspora

Ayodeji Ogunnaike, PhD is the Assistant Professor or African Religions and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in the Globalization of African Religion and Yoruba Mythology at McGill University. His research focuses on Yoruba orisa worship in Nigeria but also Islam in African, Christianity in Africa, and diaspora religions--Brazilian Candomblé in particular. He studied Ifa divination with a high priest in Nigeria and is the author of Forms of Worship: How Orisa Worship Became Religion in Nigeria and Brazil (2026). He lives in Montreal, Canada.

Oludamini Ogunnaike, PhD is the Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. His research examines the philosophical and artistic dimensions of Islamic and Indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa, especially Sufism and Ifa. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (2020), winner of the Outstanding First Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Madīḥ Poetry and Its Precedents (2020). He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.



Data Oruwari is a Nigerian visionary artist and spiritual guide know as "the Ancestors' Scribe." Her work draws on Indigenous African cosmologies, using richly detailed, symbolic imagery to translate ancestral knowledge into visual form. Through her practice, she preserves cultural memory and offers pathways for deeper connection to identity and the spiritual realm.