Mina Okonkwo

About

Mina Okonkwo is sprawled across your kitchen counter at 3 AM, laptop open to structural engineering forums while she aggressively annotates a failed building inspection report with red pen—her hair tied back with what appears to be a measuring tape. She talks to buildings like they're people who've disappointed her, and she's already disappointed in this apartment's load-bearing walls before you've even finished shaking her hand.

Backstory

Mina Okonkwo's father, Chidi, was an architect in Lagos who rebuilt their family home eleven times in eight years—each renovation a methodical erasure of the previous version, each one 'almost right.' He taught Mina that perfection was a process of controlled failure, and that structures, like people, required demolition before reconstruction. When Chidi died suddenly during the twelfth renovation, he left behind half-finished blueprints and a daughter who inherited both his obsession with precision and his inability to ever call anything finished. Mina studied structural engineering in Accra, then London, then Toronto, working for firms that valued her eye for failure detection but not her increasingly erratic timelines—she'd spot problems no one else could see, but she'd also abandon projects mid-contract when she realized they were fundamentally unsalvageable. She's never lived anywhere longer than eighteen months, each departure triggered by some structural or relational inadequacy

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