Christian Nyampeta is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher living in New York, and working in London, the Netherlands, and Rwanda where he convenes the Nyanza Working Group of the Another Roadmap African Cluster (ARAC). In New York Nyampeta sits on the Board of Directors at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and he is on the board of November magazine. Nyampeta holds a PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths completed under the supervision of Kodwo Eshun, following the examination of Leela Gandhi and Denise Ferreira da Silva.

Natacha Nsabimana teaches in the anthropology department at the university of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial critique, musical movements, and the cultural and political worlds of African peoples on the continent and in the diaspora.

Amelia Umuhire (b. 1991, Kigali, Rwanda) is a filmmaker and artist living in Kigali and Berlin. In 2015, she wrote and directed the award-winning web-series Polyglot, in which she follows the lives of young, deracinated London- and Berlin-based Rwandese artists. Her short film Mugabo was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and screened at MOCA Los Angeles and the Berlin Biennale among many other places. In 2018, Umuhire produced the Prix Europa-nominated radio feature Vaterland for the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She was a Villa Romana Fellow in 2020, and is currently working on her first feature film.

Sosena Solomon is an Ethiopian-American social documentary film and multimedia visual artist whose work explores cross-sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives through arresting visual storytelling. Solomon has worked for many years in the commercial and nonprofit sectors as a director and cinematographer on many short film projects, including Dreaming of Jerusalem, a Discovery-plus original documentary about the Ethiopian-Jewish community in Gondar, and Merkato, filmed on location in one of Africa’s largest open-air markets and exhibited internationally as an audio, visual, and sensory installation. She has exhibited work at the Sundance Film Festival, Cinema Africa, Tribeca, and DOC NYC. She earned her BA in Television Production from Temple University and her MFA in Social Documentary film from the School of Visual Arts. Solomon is currently lecturing in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and working with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe the Museum’s African art galleries.

Mpho Matsipa is an educator, researcher, and independent curator.  Matsipa holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, pursued as a Fulbright Scholar. She has curated several exhibitions, discursive platforms, and experimental architectural research including the Venice International Architecture Biennale (2008; 2021); African Mobilities at the Architecture Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2018); and Studio-X Johannesburg, in South Africa (2014-2016). Her curatorial and research interests are at the intersection of urban studies, experimental architecture, and visual art. Mpho is an associate curator for the Lubumbashi Biennale, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2024) and she teaches History and Theory at SCI-Arc.

Ahmed El Maanouni is a writer, director, cinematographer, and producer born in Casablanca in 1944. Among his essential works are Alyam Alyam (1978), the first Moroccan film to be selected at the Cannes Film Festival and winner of the 7e Art prize at FESPACO in Ouagadougou; and Al Hal [Trances] (1981), which was the first movie to be restored by the World Cinema Project in 2007. Among his other works are the feature films Burned Hearts (2007) and Fadma (2017), as well as The Paths of Freedom (2015-16), a documentary trilogy that tells the story of the Moroccan struggle for independence through the experience of families.

Omar Berrada is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020). He is currently studying racial dynamics in North Africa while living in New York.

Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and retired professor of film at Howard University in Washington DC. Born and raised in Ethiopia, Gerima emigrated to the United States in 1967. Following in the footsteps of his father, a dramatist and playwright, Gerima studied acting in Chicago before entering the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where his exposure to Latin American films inspired him to mine his own cultural legacy. After completing his thesis film, Bush Mama (1975), Gerima received international acclaim with Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), an Ethiopian drama that won the Grand Prize at the Locarno film festival. After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—USA 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic Sankofa (1993). This formally ambitious tale of a plantation slave revolt was ignored by US distributors, but Gerima tapped into African American communities, and booked sold-out screenings in independent theatres around the country. In 1996, Gerima founded the Sankofa Video and Bookstore in Washington DC, a cultural and intellectual space that offers opportunities for self-expression, interaction, discussion, and analysis through community events such as film screenings, book signings, scholar forums, and artist showcases. Gerima continues to distribute and promote his own films, including his last film Teza (2008), which won the Jury Prize and Best Screenplay awards at the Venice Film Festival. He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the US and internationally.

Merawi Gerima is an organizer with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, fighting police terror and with people power. He also makes films to help build that people power. His 2020 film Residue was about Black resistance to gentrification in his hometown, Washington DC. He is currently filming a documentary about the struggle for Community Control of the Police in Chicago and writing a film about the Alabama Chapter of the Communist Party, which was made up of and led by Black sharecroppers, factory workers, housewives, and unemployed people in the middle of the Great Depression, and which ultimately gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement.

Honey Crawford is an Assistant Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at New York University. She studies Afro-Brazilian vernacular performance as both a scholar and a practitioner, and she positions women-driven spectacles of black consciousness in the twentieth to twenty-first century against prevalent discourse on the black diaspora and performance studies. Her research privileges embodied knowledge and oral traditions while investigating attempts to capture or contain these forms in literature and text-centric works. Her current book project gives attention to theatrical traditions that indulge in an aesthetic of excess, identifying a preoccupation with the transgressive potential held in performances of black feminine power. Where studies of cultural performance of the black diaspora most commonly address the contributions of black women in terms of preservation, her manuscript troubles the temporal and socio-spatial containment that preservation implies. She contemplates how certain legacies refuse containment and in fact promise to exceed outwardly measured constraints through the notion of overwhelming. Honey earned her MFA in Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts and her PhD in Theatre Studies at Cornell University.