Nigerian-American producer, Ibra Ake, was the only Nigerian to win a Grammy at the 61st Grammy Awards which held on Sunday at Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.
Ake was one of the creative directors of the music video that made the most wins at the 2019 Grammys, winning “Best Music Video”, “Best Rap/Sung Performance,” “Record of the Year” and is also the first rap song to win “Song of The Year” in the history of the Grammy awards.
The Los Angeles based producer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker tweeted;
Ake started as a freelance photographer, spending most of his growing years between Nigeria and New Jersey. He is also the writer of comedy-drama television series “Atlanta”. Working on the now Grammy-winning Childish Gambino song came after a number of prior collaborations with the latter on designing album covers, creative directing, screenwriting and more.
In an interview with OkayAfrica last year, about the ‘This is America” project, Ibra said:
“With ‘This is America,’ for example, It’s fun to see the reaction because the distribution is so large; it’s so weird to see your ideas disperse on such a large format, but then again it’s kind of crippling sometimes because everything feels super high stakes. I think we’ve learned a lot. I think the whole experience has been not normal for sure. I don’t want everyone to think what happened is a normal career move. It’s been very affirming just to see your ideas, especially in the first time, work out because none of that is the norm. We want to make sure that we’re learning constantly and that’s important to us.”
— Ibra
Ake is also being nominated for Writers Guild of America Awards scheduled for 18th February 2019, for his work in ‘Atlanta’.
Featured image source: The Cable Lifestyle