Havana, Cuba. In 2007, Okpa-Iroha was announced first runner-up of the Life in My City Art and Photography competition, organized by the Alliance Franciase and Rokana Industries in Enugu, Nigeria. In 2008, his first major project “The Under Bridge Life” was favorably received by critics and exposed him to international audiences. The project earned him the Seydou Keita award for the Best Photographic Creation at the 2009 edition of the African Photography Encounters in Bamako and in the same year, he received the Jean-Paul Blachere Foundation Prize for the same work. In 2011, Uche Okpa-Iroha was one of 25 artists selected for a two-year residency research fellowship programme at the Rijksakademie Van Bleeldende Kunsten. The prestigious Rijskakdemie Van Bleeldende Kunsten, which was founded by King William III in 1870 provided Uche the platform for developing his talent on an international scale and further exposed his works to the international community. He has been exhibited in various places including New York, Paris, Canada, Belgium, Spain, Germany, France and Berlin. He was on the Panel of Nominators for WorldPressPhoto's Joop Swart Masterclass selection committee in 2016. He is also a member of the International Federation of Kidney Foundation Notable works Plantation Boy (2012) Completed during the final year of his residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the 'Plantation Boy' series see Okpa-Iroha intervening in Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film, The Godfather by isolating and appropriating forty original film stills from the seminal movie. Through a process of digital reconstructions, the artist disrupts an iconic Hollywood image with the presence of an African man amongst the familial gangs of an Italian-American subculture. By meticulously placing himself in the frame of the images through strategies of reconstruction and reenactment, he addresses the politics of representation in western cinema that is marked by a striking absence of black bodies. He also challenges stereotypical and subservient representations of African identity by taking center stage within seminal and iconic scenes from the film to demonstrate 'the subjective representation of the presence of an omission' and as a representation of a deviant culture or race that was not originally there. The title situates the work within the black and African quest for freedom and self-determination that arose in the slave plantation era and continues to impact the lives of black subjects globally. He won the Seydou Keita Prize for this Series in 2009. ISOLATED