Mimi Cherono Ng'ok (born 1983) is a Kenyan photographer, living in Nairobi. Her "photographs are a visual diary of the experiences and emotions emerging from her itinerant life". Ng'ok's work has been shown at the Hayward Gallery, Berlin Biennale, Carnegie International and African Photography Encounters, and is held in the Walther Collection.
Ng'ok grew up in the rural outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. In 2006 she graduated with a BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Her 2008 series I am Home, on African immigrants living in South Africa, deals with "issues of home, displacement, loss, and identity". A project begun in 2013, made in countries where she has lived and travelled, was described by Alexandra Genova in Time as "a series of vignettes on memory, loss and lust revealed through Ng'ok's experiences." Given that Ng'ok believes home is not a place, but a state of mind, Genova wrote that the work "explores this temporality through the intersection of people and place". Diane Smyth in the British Journal of Photography described Ng'ok's work in an exhibition called Africa State of Mind as giving "a personal interpretation of place, in contrast to the apparently objective lens of documentary photography".
Everyone is Lonely in Kigali was made in Dakar, Accra, Berlin, Abidjan, Kampala, Kigali, Nairobi and Johannesburg and includes her frequently used subject matter: trees, the tropics, horses and an unidentified male figure. The series Do You Miss Me? Sometimes, Not Always, was made over six months after October 2014, in the cities of Kigali, Abidjan, Kampala, and Nairobi in memory of her friend Thabiso Sekgala, who died.
Ng'ok's work is held in the following permanent collections: