Participant bios
Grace Barber-Plentie is a London-based freelance film writer and programmer with a focus on the works of Black women directors, representations of the fat body and, whenever possible, the oeuvre of Barbra Streisand.
Maria Cabrera is a film programmer dedicated to celebrating the stories of Black and Latin American people, using film as a tool for creating spaces of discussion within communities and to unearth personal identities and histories. Maria is the co-founder of Reel Good Film Club (no longer active) and has coordinated programming and filmmaking initiatives with Barbican, Creative Skillset, LAWRS, and has delivered talks and hosted discussions at The Whitechapel Gallery, British Film Institute, Queen Mary University and ICA London.
Ufuoma Essi is a video artist and filmmaker from Lewisham, South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image as well as photography and sound.
Her work explores intersectional themes of race, gender, class and sexuality. The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of the historical narrative. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-centre the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of black women. Drawing from a range of influences including black popular culture, films, music, historical texts and black feminist theory from writers such as Claudia Jones to Daphne A Brooks. Within Ufuoma’s work she seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and she is particularly interested in exploring the production of Black images and interrogating how they are presented.
Ufuoma’s films have been screened and exhibited at institutions, galleries and film festivals in the UK and abroad such as the Barbican Centre, South London Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, Croydon Art Store, Chisenhale Studios, Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival and Black Star Film Festival.
She is also member of the Black and POC women and non-binary artist collective Narration Group based at the South London Gallery.
Javie Huxley is a British-Chilean illustrator based in London, and a campaigner and trustee for Save Latin Village. Following her MA in Children’s Literature & Illustration, she has been an editorial illustrator for magazines such as gal-dem and Shado. She loves using art as advocacy, regularly exploring themes like identity and social justice in her work.
Onyeka Igwe (part of B.O.S.S. Collective) is an artist filmmaker, programmer and researcher. She is born and based in London, UK. In her non-fiction, video work, Onyeka uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives. The work explores the physical body and geographical place as sites of cultural and political meaning.
B.O.S.S. Collective are: Adae, Deborah Findlater, Evan Ifekoya, Gin Resis’Dance, Jlte, Hakeem Kazeem, Marcus Macdonald, Mellowdramatics, Mwen, Naeem Davis, Natasha Nkonde, Onyeka Igwe, Shenece Oretha, Phoebe Collings-James, Shy One, Sad Queers Club (sqc) and Shamica.
Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British writer. Her debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Observer, The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have been published internationally including Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2017, Kwani? and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She was presented at the London Short Story Festival by Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri as a dynamic talent and featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors. Her short story collection Speak Gigantular, published by Jacaranda Books was shortlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her new collection of stories, Nudibranch, published by Little Brown’s Dialogue Books was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the story, Grace Jones, won the 2020 AKO Caine Prize For Fiction. www.irenosenokojie.com. Find her on Twitter: @IrenosenOkojie.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer, organiser and Stuart Hall Foundation scholar from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.