JIL MANDENG

Jil Mandeng (b. 1991, Santiago, Chile) is a London-based artist whose work explores identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance through portraiture, football symbolism, clothing, and masks. Born to a Cameroonian-Polish father and a German mother, she spent her childhood moving between London, Germany, Washington, D.C., the Dominican Republic, France, and Hong Kong. These experiences continue to inform a practice shaped
by questions of migration, nationality, and what it means to belong to multiple places at once.
 

Mandeng's paintings bring together football shirts, masks, and national symbols to create hybrid figures that exist between cultures. Drawing on football's unique ability to unite and divide, her recent work examines how ideas of nationality and identity are performed, celebrated, and contested.

 

Through unexpected combinations of cultural symbols, she challenges fixed notions of belonging and reflects the layered realities of contemporary
identity.
 

Mandeng graduated with an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 2022, having previously studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2023, was a finalist for the Ingram Prize in 2023, and was selected for the Football Art Prize in 2026.