Ozichi Okorom is a third-year student from Queens, New York. She is pursuing the Global, Race, and Ethnicity track because of her interest in Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian feminist activism, as well as the impact of the Nigerian Civil War on the way that Nigerian Igbos raise their U.S. born children. 

During her first-year, Ozichi participated in a class called, “Princeton, Slavery, and Historical Memory”, where she helped to bring to light Princeton University’s relationship with slavery. In this class, she conducted genealogical research to help trace the ancestry of her classmates, some of whom were the descendants of the enslaved, as well as the slaveholding. As a second-year student, Ozichi played a lead role in Eclipsed by Danai Gurira, directed by Shariffa Ali. The play followed the experiences of five women during the Second Liberian Civil War. The summer before her third year, Ozichi was granted funding from the Martin A. Dale’ 53 Summer Awards, where she spent two months in Brazil interviewing black women to learn about the influence of religion and spirituality in their everyday lives.

Her favorite class so far was taught by AAS and English Professor Kinohi Nishikawa, titled “African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present”. In the class, she read seminal literary texts like Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Street by Ann Petry, which tracked  Black American social movements through a literary lens. 

On campus, Ozichi is involved in Princeton’s premier African dance group Dorobucci, as well as one of the founders of an emerging group called the Black Spectrum Collective, which is dedicated to building a radical community and providing resources for Black artists on Princeton’s campus.