Virginia Ryan is an Australian-born interdisciplinary artist educated in Australia and Italy. In 2004, along with the late Professor Joe Nkrumah, Ryan co-founded the Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA) in Ghana of which she was the director until 2007. As part of her support for younger artists in Africa, Ryan has also brought together the practicing artists involved in FCA with New York University and established the FCA Art Library, which continues to grow within the foundation office even after her departure.

Much of her artistic research between the years 2000-2010 has been concerned with identity, land and memory, resulting in large-scale projects such as The Castaways Project, a collaborative work with the sound artist, ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Steven Feld. Over this period Ryan worked primarily in West Africa yet continued to partly work and exhibit in Europe and America. Recent exhibitions include the solo presentation Fluid Tales at the Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali in Bari, Italy in 2014.