Ufuoma Essi

Ufuoma Essi is an artist and filmmaker, working predominantly with moving images drawing from a range of influences including Black popular culture and performance studies. Ufuoma’s research revolves around Black feminist epistemologies and configurations of displaced histories. Through archival explorations, and processes of unlearning and discovery, she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of political and historical narratives to re-center the marginalized histories of the Black Atlantic.

During her residency, she will conduct archival research and interviews around the Black Journal and forms of Black-focused public television broadcasting in the U.S. in response to the Kerner Commission (1967). Interested in charting internationalist Black histories and artistic production, Ufuoma aims to draw parallels with The Black Film Workshop Movement in the 1980s in the U.K., when radical filmmaking collectives emerged in a context of divisive national politics and civil unrest.