Awuor Onguru

Awuor Onguru is a writer, musician, and arts educator from Nairobi, Kenya. She is a Mastercard Foundation Scholar at the University of Oxford, where she is pursuing an MSt in World Literatures in English at Mansfield College.

She holds a BA in English (Creative Writing) from Yale University, where she graduated with Distinction in the Major and earned an advanced language certificate in French. Following her undergraduate study, she received the Charles P. Howland Fellowship and the Yale Glee Club Service Through Music Fellowship to support community-based arts projects in Kenya. She is the Editor-in-Chief of DIASPORA, a publication of Zikora Arts Foundation that commissions and curates original work from across the African diaspora.

Awuor’s recent production, Surviving Death, marked her debut as a producer and director. The multidisciplinary choral and projection performance, which featured the African premiere of Wally Gunn’s The Ascendant, played to a sold-out audience in Nairobi.

Her writing has been published in Menacing Hedge, BRINK!, Teen Vogue, Cake Zine, Kenya’s Daily Nation, and Langaa publications’ Covid Stories from East Africa and Beyond. Her play Seeds won the Yale Playwrights Festival and premiered in New Haven in 2023.

A trained operatic mezzo-soprano and violinist, Awuor has performed with the Nairobi Orchestra, Baraka Opera Kenya, and the Nairobi Music Society, and internationally with ensembles including the Yale Glee Club, where she served as President during its 163rd season.

At Oxford, she aims to deepen her exploration of how voice, identity, and creative expression can drive social transformation, with the long-term goal of building an academic and artistic career that integrates teaching, research, and performance.