Visual Artist
DWC Class of 2015
Bunmi Agusto
Sevenoaks School BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins
During her time at DWC, Bunmi was Head Girl, a Student Mentor and captain of the Volleyball Team. She also was a member of the Basketball, Football and Dance teams. In her five years at the school, she won academic awards in Art & Design, Business Studies, Mathematics, ICT, Physical Education as well as the Tayo Aderinokun Leadership Award. In Year 10, she participated in the Microsoft Office Specialist Competition and came 1st nationwide in Microsoft Word 2007 and 3rd in Microsoft Powerpoint 2007. She went on to compete at the Microsoft Office Specialist Worldwide Championship in California and came 2nd in the Microsoft Word category against competitors aged up to 22. She subsequently become the first African to place in the top three in the competition’s fifteen-year history. As a result, she was selected to attend the Global Young Leaders’ Conference in 2015 which took place across Vienna, Prague and Berlin.
After DWC, she attended Sevenoaks School where she completed the International Baccalaureate. During her time there, she was a prefect and a member of the Art History Society, Photography Club, Basketball Team, Volleyball Team and Football Team. She was the President of the Amnesty International Society at the height of the Syrian migrant crisis and she spearheaded fundraising and petitioning of the local council to accommodate more refugees. She was also awarded Creative Colours and Boarding House Colours for her contribution to the school. She applied to universities in the UK and US to study Fine Art and was offered five scholarships from some of the world’s top art schools including the Presidential Scholarship from the Milwaukee Institute of Art, the Dean’s Scholarship from Parsons School of Design and a Merit Scholarship from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. However, she chose to study at the world-renowned Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
During her university career, Bunmi interned at TAFETA, a London-based gallery that specialises in modern and contemporary African Art and represents the works of celebrated Nigerian artists like Ben Enwonwu MBE, Yinka Shonibare CBE and Victor Ekpuk. In her second year, she was selected to spend six months studying abroad at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in The Netherlands. When she returned to London, she took her first shot at curation in 2019 by partnering with students at the London School of Economics for an art exhibition in order to foster the relationship between the financial and creative sectors from an early stage. Within a year of the exhibition, several of the featured of artists went on to receive awards for their art including Bunmi. In 2019, she was selected to be part of Xhibit, an exhibition featuring 27 artists from across all of UAL’s six world-leading colleges, where she was awarded the Cass Art Prize for innovative use of material. She was later longlisted as one of the Top Black Students in the UK by Rare Rising Stars. Bunmi has now graduated from Central Saint Martins with First Class Honours and was awarded the Cass Art Prize again for her work in the college’s Degree Show. Today, she has participated in over twenty exhibitions internationally including shows at the Saatchi Gallery, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, Christie’s Education and 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Paris.