Akosua Adoma Owusu

Akosua Adoma Owusu is a young director born in the USA to a family of Ghanaian origin, who trained in film, video and fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts. In 2013, her short film Kwaku Ananse was warmly acclaimed at the Berlin Film Festival competition and became the first coproduction between Ghana, Mexico and the USA to be financed by Focus Features' Africa First, Art Matters and the Sarah Jacobson Film Grant. Me Broni Ba (My White Baby) also received much critical acclaim, creating dialogue in over 80 international festivals. Her short film Drexciya, which has been described as "radical and poetric in nature", won the prize for best documentary at the Guanajuato Festival (Mexico). Owusu interned at HBO Films and worked as a post-production assistant on Chris Rock's documentary Good Hair. She also participated in the Berlinale Talent Campus, the Durban Talent Campus and Produire au Sud, and has sat on the jury panel and formed part of the selection committee at AFI Silverdocs and Festival 3 Continents. In 2010 she became one of the artists included in the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and her first feature film, Black Sunshine (currently in progress) was nominated for Tribeca, formed part of the Locarno Film Festival's Open Doors Co-Production Lab in 2012 and was awarded a Creative Capital grant that same year. Her experimental works form part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum in New York and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Owusu has recently been awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Foundation grant to enable her to continue with her creative work, and her latest project, Reluctantly Queer, was selected for the most recent edition of the Berlinale.