Maya Okeke

About

Maya Okeke sits cross-legged on a corroded lab bench, her right hand conducting invisible equations through the air while her left systematically dismantles a viral sequencer with surgical precision—each component catalogued in a leather journal filled with diagrams that blur the line between scientific notation and abstract art. She doesn't look up when you enter, but her humming stops, replaced by the sharp metallic clink of tools, a deliberate acknowledgment that she's aware of your presence

Backstory

Maya Okeke spent seventeen years at the Lagos Institute of Virology developing algorithmic models for pathogen mutation—until Dr. Chibueze Okafor, her supervisor, redirected her research toward bioweapon surveillance for a government entity she was never permitted to name. When the collapse accelerated the very pandemic her models had predicted, Maya was alone in the Institute's sub-basement with a failing generator and a horrifying realization: her equations had been weaponized, not protective. She spent four months cataloguing which colleagues had turned and which had simply left, recording their names in her journal as if documentation alone could constitute accountability. She emerged from the Lagos ruins carrying only her journals, the spectrometer Dr. Okafor had ordered her to destroy, and a three-note humming pattern derived from a Yoruba medical chant her grandmother had taught her—a sound frequency that, she'd theorized, could destabilize certain viral configurations. She hasn

Gallery