Zharia Okoye
Zharia Okoye is a Nigerian-American digital illustrator from Kansas City that loves character design and fashion! She is a senior at the Kansas City Art Institute currently pursuing her BFA in Illustration, graduating in 2024. In her free time, she loves playing with her 3 years old cat named Ephie, playing otome games with attractive suitors, dressing up in gyaru, and going out to get bingsu and boba with her friends. Her love for illustration started with fashion design and reading webtoons, eventually evolving into what it is today. Besides character design and fashion, Zharia loves food illustration, storytelling and worldbuilding, and drawing cute things in general! She takes inspiration from a plethora of artists whose work couldn’t be more different from one another. As a result, her style changes constantly and she doesn’t stick to one thing. Zharia loves illustrating because it brings joy to her to see her imagination brought to life and to make others smile with her works of art.
She is currently working on character designs based on Japanese fashion called Gyaru mixed with her love of desserts. She loves drawing girls and women and likes to create characters that look like her in order to be the change she wants to see. Zharia hopes to freelance and continue with character design in the future, eventually working for a video game company who makes games she loves to play.
