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Growing up in a family of storytellers in Aba in southeastern Nigeria, Emezi realized at an early age that she enjoyed everything creative. After a spell in the United States for school where she experimented with blogging, YouTubing, and managing a website highlighting African artists, she moved back to Nigeria with the hope of starting a television show about African women and their sexualities—conversations often held behind closed doors due to shame and stigma. When it didn’t work out due to financial challenges, photography emerged as a way for Emezi to combine her creative impulses and develop something new.

In 2015, Emezi was introduced to the founder of Lagos Fashion Week, Omoyemi Akerele, who invited her to take backstage photographs of models preparing for the runway. This opportunity gave her career momentum, and soon after she began working with luxury fashion houses in Lagos and developing her photography skills. Then, another offer arrived: a non-profit organization asked her to relocate to Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, to work with women and girls in the capital’s densely-populated West Point township. Arriving in the city only two weeks after the initial invitation, Emezi spent time with the women—who she excitedly describes as dressing with “bright pink braids with […] blue eyeliner, and green lipstick”—discussing what beauty means away from a western-centric framework. The question she asked was a simple one: “what is your standard of beauty?”

This line of investigation runs through the core of Emezi’s photographs: she’s committed to centering the voices of those traditionally ignored or disregarded, and asking her audience to rethink what they believe they already know about sexuality, African women’s desires, beauty, health, and human rights. The photographs from her time in West Point are arresting: women wearing vivid clothing and a plethora of hairstyles, such as braids and cropped afros, boldly meet and hold the camera’s gaze against colorful backdrops. They present a wildly different view to images in wide circulation where clear power disparities are often visible.

Emezi’s time in Monrovia led to an introduction to a photo editor at The New York Times, which has enabled her get to where she is today, balancing commissioned photo stories—covering topics as varied as women’s leadership in Rwanda and migration due to climate change in Chad—with her own personal practice. For the latter, she creates bodies of work away from social media that are viewable to museums, galleries and collectors. While influenced by her photojournalism practice, these projects are also markedly different in tone and subject. Emezi has been working on them for several  years—a markedly slower pace in comparison to the quickfire turnaround times often expected with commissioned works—and considers them an opportunity to create work about her life, especially in relation to ideas of nostalgia and her upbringing in Nigeria.

Emezi is at the forefront of storytelling on the African continent. She’s part of a new vanguard dedicated to reclaiming agency and spotlighting underrepresented narratives. While she views many of her stories as instrumental, one of her most memorable was when she collaborated with a writer to cover the aftermath of former Gambian president Yahya Jammeh’s 22-year reign in office for The New York Times. Emezi describes meeting the mother of a man who had been brutally killed during Jammeh’s premiership, and what it meant to photograph someone who has gone through so much pain and suffering. “The women have always been talking, fighting, speaking up, trying to raise awareness […] I’m simply in awe of them. They’re activists in their own right.” Emezi’s work is also a form of activism, one dedicated to changing narratives and perspectives.