Courage Dzidula Kpodo

Courage Dzidula Kwaku Kpodo is a recent architecture-graduate and researcher based between Ghana and the US. He has architecture degrees from KNUST in Kumasi and MIT in Boston. His work is primarily concerned with the socio-cultural transformations within built and cultivated spaces, the aspirations of the humans and non-humans that make them, and the materials that support or resist these transformations. He has expressed this in a range of media, first in an archival image-based project he co-founded called Postbox Ghana, which looks into the intersection of architecture and the image-making cultures in post-independent Ghana and West African states. With a research outlook, this work has been installed in various public sites in Ghana including the Makola market, a repurposed concrete grain silo, and a commercial billboard. He was invited to present iterations of this work in the 2023 Architecture Biennial in Venice under the Curator’s special project, “Guests from the Future”, in the 2023 Vantage Point photography exhibition in Sharjah, and in several exhibitions in Dakar, Ouidah, Accra, and Lagos.

He worked on the set-design and production for a 40-minute single-take film that explored the social tensions of the north-south migration within Ghana. The film, “Certain Winds from the South”, screened in 3 Ghanaian cities mentioned in the film (Accra, Kumasi, Tamale) and internationally in New York and in Berlin’s International Film Festival.

In 2024, he led the construction of a 2 kilometer path through the cocoa hills of Ghana. As an ongoing body of work, the path would become the catalyst and site for generating socio-cultural futures in a place historically shaped by the cocoa cash-crop production. He worked with the group of farmers and land-owners implicated by the path and its politics. It became the stage and site for his Master of Architecture thesis in MIT, where he proposed an ecological and architectural framework to realize those futures. 

He is  the lead curator for the 2025 Lagos Photo Festival, helping transition the annual exhibition into a biennale format with the theme "Incarceration".

He has given talks, lectures, interviews and panel discussions in several institutions including KNUST, MIT, the Architectural Association, and the BBC.