Contributors

Dicky Jnr is a Kenyan-based multimedia designer with over ten years’ experience in print design, identity design, animation and TV production. 

Yaa Addae is a multidisciplinary dreamer primarily working between essays, film, and research. Currently, she is based in Accra, Ghana where she works in gallery arts administration, communications consulting, and facilitates a community-based learning school for creative growth, A-kra. You can find her on www.womaninja.com and sometimes on Instagram and Twitter at @womaninja

Demi Ademuson (Aanu Ademuson) is Filmmaker and writer, born in Lagos Nigeria, where he currently resides. He studied Behavioural Economics at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom and was founding editor of The Irin Journal, a travel and culture magazine focused on African cities. Through film, he aims to tells stories about Africa and Africans, exploring both inner and outer lives of characters, with the belief that the context of the environments his characters live in, shed a deep insight into their experiences in ways that the content alone cannot.

Ayọ̀ Akínwándé is a contemporary Nigerian artist born and based in Lagos. Akínwándé’s practice is multi-disciplinary, experimenting with lens based media, installation, sculpture, performance and sound to explore concepts of identity, duality and the multi-faceted layers of the human reality. 

Rahel Aklilu is a music and culture freelancer from London with a background in law and a penchant for sugar.

Bakang Akoonyatse is a writer based in Gaborone, Botswana. Her writing centres on topics ranging from music to motherhood, feminism, mental health and sexuality. Bylines include Wear Your Voice, Mail & Guardian, Okay Africa, True Africa, Drum, Hype and AHHB, to name a few.  Twitter: @ToniWhorrison

Jesse Bernard is a writer, editor and music researcher based in London. He is currently a contributing editor for Trench Magazine and has also featured in the publication SAFE: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space, edited by Derek Owusu. Jesse’s work specifically focuses on mapping the sociocultural history and genealogy of Black music in Britain.

Sarah Bushra is a multi-disciplinary artist working primarily with a hybrid of text and image, meditating on the role of collective memory in creating and transforming cultures of communication. She works with the body as the focal point of exploration and a metaphor to navigate Ethiopian contemporary identity through performance, curatorial practice and art writing. She is interested in cultural management and as an artist and programmer, facilitates the current movement towards increasing visibility and impactful representations of Ethiopian culture in contemporary contexts. 

Jareh Das is a researcher, writer and curator based between Nigerian and the UK who works on diverse visual arts projects independently with artists, arts institutions and non-profits centred ‘on the contemporary.’ Jareh was awarded her doctorate in July 2018 in Curating Art and Science: New Methods and Sites of Production and Display offered in partnership with Royal Holloway, University of London. Her current research focuses on Contemporary Performance Art in West Africa.

Wanjeri Gakuru is a freelance journalist, essayist and filmmaker living and working in Nairobi. She is the Managing Editor of Jalada Africa, a pan-African writers’ collective. A cross-section of her writing has appeared in Transition Magazine, The Africa Report, LA Times Magazine, The Elephant and Msafiri, among others. 

Asher Gamedze is a cultural worker who reads and writes about revolutionary thought and practice, black cultural production, histories, futures and organises and does education work with collectives like the interim and pathways to free education. Gamedze plays music as a drummer and a percussionist and performs with a variety of ensembles from Jozi to Chicago and Cape Town.

Toka Hlongwane is a television director and producer who currently creates content for SABC’s education and children’s genres. After having a stint as a photojournalist, he developed a deeper appreciation for human narratives that are muted or unnoticed in society. This saw him immersing himself in taking pictures in-order to bring these stories to life. Toka holds a Media Studies Diploma from Boston Media House where he majored in Television Production and Journalism. When he isn’t on set directing and creating TV, he is involved in street and documentary photography.

Esther Aminata Kamara is a freelance writer and artist manager who is currently based in Freetown. Born to a Sierra Leonean father and a Dutch mother, she grew up in Amsterdam, got a BA Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam, and moved to Freetown to work in the music industry at the age of 23. Esther is especially interested in works that deal with alienation, identity, the absurdity of reality, and how cultural and psychological structures influence perception. Hence, her biggest influences are the likes of Murakami, Adichie, Miyazaki, Orwell, Ishiguro and von Trier. Her own work spans from non-fiction articles on Sierra Leonean arts and culture and speculative works of fiction.

Matt Kayem is a contemporary artist, art critic and writer living and working in Kampala, Uganda. 

Nikita Keogotsitse is an arts researcher and writer. Her interests are sprawling, and include photography, the archive – as it relates to issues of gender, race and representation – ways of knowing and epistemic injustices, the creative labour and practice(s) of black womxn. She is also occupied with cultivating a practice that lies at the intersection of the metaphysical, the esoteric, African cosmology and spiritual knowledge systems as a way to theorise, think with, through and about art and visual practices.

Gloria Kiconco is a poet, essayist, and zine-maker based in Kampala, Uganda. Her poetry is published online by Brittle Paper, Lawino,and Sooo Many Stories and featured in the anthologies 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary PoetryDear Nev: An Anthology of East African Writers; and Wondering and Wandering of Hearts. She was a correspondent for Commonwealth Writers (2015/16) and is a regular contributor for People Stories Project, which has published her work through the platform, Lets Be Brief. Her personal essays have appeared in The Forager Magazine, Doppiozero’s Why Africa?Writivism, and Adda. Gloria created SOLD OUT, her first collection of poetry zines in 2016. In 2018, she premiered RETURN TO SENDER, a solo poetry performance and zine made in collaboration with illustrator, Liz Kobusinge. 

Rofhiwa Maneta is a Johannesburg-based writer and photographer whose work has appeared in VICE (US), The Fader (US) and Noisey (UK). His yet-to-be-titled book is forthcoming from Blackbird Books. 

Masiyaleti Mbewe is a queer afrofuturist writer, photographer, activist, academic, TEDx alumnus and Masters in Arts student based in Windhoek, Namibia. Her work revolves around the use of various mediums to navigate and negotiate alternative African futures using the confluence of language and cultural exchange in the representation of Africans in popular culture. Her research also aims to examine African technologies, the digitization of African futures and the use of art to expand these concepts.

Natachi Mez seeks to nourish. She is a Nigerian-American writer, performer, teaching artist, and emcee from the Sacramento Area in California. Through improvisation, call & response, and collective breathing, Natachi facilitates dynamic experiences that deepen audience engagement and celebrate community voice. Natachi works as a Business Program Manager, focusing on community building, communications, intercultural awareness, and design, and is almost always ready to hop into a dance circle.

Moshood lives somewhere in Ghana – from where he writes across genres. His work has appeared in a number of publications, both online and in print. He loves rain and fancies himself an egalitarian. He is currently trying out  other exercises in self-expression.

Nkgopoleng Moloi is a Johannesburg-based writer and photographer with a specific interest in the spaces we occupy and navigate, and how this influences the people we become. Writing is a tool she uses to understand the world around her and to explore the things she is excited and intrigued by; particularly history, art, language and architecture. She is fascinated by cities, their complexities and their potential.

Tseliso Monaheng is a freelancer with over 10 years’ worth of professional experience in the mediums of writing, photography, videography and video editing. He is currently based in Johannesburg. His written work has appeared in print and on-line publications. He has contributed to outlets such as Guardian (UK), The Fader (US), Red Bull (UK & SA), Chimurenga, Rolling Stone, Africa Is a Country, and more.

Jesse Gerard Mpango is a writer, curator and educator based in Dar-es-salaam Tanzania. He is currently the Visual Arts Manager of Nafasi Art Space, a multidisciplinary contemporary art centre,  where he has curated exhibitions for rising artists and those established internationally. He is also the host of a music podcast, Wikiendi Radio and has written stories and essays for platforms such as Brittle Paper and The Afrovibe.    

Timothy Niwamanya is  a Ugandan writer and filmmaker with a background in both print and digital media. He is one part of the trio behind the long-running Ugandan film podcast, Cinema Red Pill. His written work is mainly centred on film theory and film criticism.

Evans Kafui Offori is an artivist seeking freedom and healing from among and beyond the pieces of themself. They dream of a world where poverty does not exist; where the most marginalised have the freedom to be; where there is space for people to heal; where kindness and love overflow; where art is allowed to blossom. When they are not being tormented by their own thoughts, they can be found writing or working as a creative director of music projects for artists in Accra

Tega Okiti is a Film Festival Consultant and Creative Producer. She is currently working as Programme Assistant at arts agency LUX and Programme Advisor for Sub Saharan Africa at the BFI London Film Festival. Her recent curatorial projects include, ‘Unbound: Visions of the Black Feminine’ at BFI Southbank and ‘I Don’t Protest’ – the first solo exhibition from award-winning artist filmmaker and animator Jessica Ashman. As a writer, Tega explores the intersections of race, gender and popular culture on African and diasporic image making. 

Mamello Sejake is a wildflower, an intersectional feminist, a researcher and a loud laughing daring Afro fairy. They spend a lot of time writing, deleting what they’ve written, planning to write, snatching edges and dropping gems like a careless jeweller. Their research interests and writing focus on exploring the politics of sexualities, gendered and identity politics as well as the complexities, contradictions and politics of pleasure and kink. 

Cindy Sissokho was born in Paris, France and currently lives in Nottingham, UK. She is a cultural producer, curator and young writer with a specific interest in intellectual, political and artistic aspects of decoloniality within the arts and feminist movements and writings. Specifically, decolonial artistic practices, curatorial and institutional methodologies. She is passionate about the dissemination of epistemologies and new cultural production from the ‘Global South,’ as a social and political space. Sissokho currently works as a Curator and Special Projects Producer at the New Art Exchange, the largest contemporary art space in the UK focusing on underrepresented practices in the arts. she is also part of a Nottingham-based collective, SheAfriq, a group of creative women of African descent that programme a diverse range of events in and out of institutions to reclaim their space within the city.

      

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