Joël Claude Mpah Dooh (also Joel Mpah Dooh) is a Cameroonian visual artist born in Nkongsamba in 1956, who lives and works in Douala. He trained at the Conservatoire Municipal des Beaux-Arts in Amiens, France, and his work belongs to the African contemporary art that emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century.
His first canvases show filiform figures in postures of pain and a search for deliverance. Over time his paintings moved toward very urban writings, close to graffiti, and then toward volume, with three-dimensional figures representing amorphous people left to themselves. He also works with aluminium foil that he paints and scratches, and with scratched Plexiglas sheets that create shadow play when light passes through them.
In 1992 he was the author of one of the four works in the Art'venture series that doual'art offered to the city of Douala. That same year he met the artist Koko Komégné, with whom he cofounded the Kheops Club collective in 1994. He has shown individually and collectively in Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, the United States, Cuba, Lebanon and France.
His legacy is tied mainly to the renewal of Cameroonian painting and to the dialogue between figure, urban writing and sculpture in contemporary African art.