Despite a global pedigree, Adesuwa, now stationed in New York City, is American by birth – thanks to her mother’s ingenuity and determination to give her kids every opportunity. For her two sons and Adesuwa, she travelled from Nigeria to Maryland to give birth, guaranteeing all of her children birthright citizenship, and then back to Africa to raise them. When Adesuwa was 13, her older brother died and her family moved back to America for good; it changed the course of her life forever. After skipping a few grades, she enrolled at the University of Maryland to study medicine when she was 16. “I wanted to make sure that my parents didn’t feel so sad he was gone, so I spent years trying to be him. Everything he would do, I would try to do,” she tells Refinery29. Her brother had hopes to become a doctor; Adesuwa stifled her desire to study art and enrolled in chemistry, pre-med. “In the first semester, my teacher called my parents in and said, Hey, I think your daughter is depressed. Because I never talked about my brother dying. We were so close, we were like twins.”