Collective

Jim Chuchu is a multidisciplinary Kenyan artist whose work spans film, music, photography, and visual arts. He rose to prominence as a founding member of the alternative music group Just a Band before co-founding the Nest Collective, a Nairobi-based multidisciplinary art collective exploring contemporary African and LGBTQ+ identities.

His critically-acclaimed directorial work includes the anthology film Stories of Our Lives, which won the Jury Prize at the 2015 Berlinale Teddy Awards and has screened in over 90 countries, and experimental shorts like VR short Let This Be a Warning, speculative doc Tapi! and We Need Prayers. His visual works have exhibited at a variety of institutions including the MoMA, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and the Vitra Design Museum.

As co-creator of the International Inventories Programme (2018–2021), Chuchu helped catalogue over 32,000 Kenyan cultural objects held in global institutions, becoming a vocal advocate for cultural repatriation and delivering a TED talk titled Why are stolen African artifacts still in Western museums? in 2021.

A co-founding partner of HEVA, which has invested over $3 million in East African creative businesses, Chuchu recently composed for the Netflix documentary Hack Your Health and is currently co-producing Fight for Food, a documentary exploring Kenyan food systems. His practice continues to interrogate cultural identity, futures, heritage, and the lingering effects of colonialism through innovative storytelling across multiple mediums.

Robin Coste Lewis won the National Book Award for* Voyage of the Sable Venus*, her first collection of poetry. The book was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and it was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New York Times. Literary Hub named it one of the best books of the last twenty years. Her second book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, was the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award for Oustanding Literary Work in Poetry. She is also the coauthor, with Kevin Young, of Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The former poet laureate of Los Angeles, Lewis holds a PhD in Poetry and Visual Studies from the University of Southern California, an MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a BA from Hampshire College in post-colonial literature and creative writing. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and The Massachusetts Review. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Mati Diop is a French-Senegalese filmmaker born in Paris in 1982. Since her start as a visual artist in the early 2000s and her leading role in Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (2008), she has built an eclectic body of work which includes her award-winning short films Atlantiques (2009), Big in Vietnam (2010), Snow Canon (2011), A Thousand Suns (2013), In my room (2020).

With her first feature film Atlantics (2019), winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by Dahomey (2024) being awarded The Golden Bear at the Berlinale (both short listed at the Oscars), she has established herself as one of the leading figures of international auteur cinema and a new wave in African and diasporic cinema. Her political and lyrical cinema challenge the boundaries between genres and formats like a reflection of her mixed identity. With the creation of Fanta Sy, a film house based in Dakar, she pursues her artistic commitment on the African continent.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a Professor of Art at Cooper Union. Fusco is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a United States Artists fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Mendes Wood DM.

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015), English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours (2001) and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). Tomorrow I Will Become an Island, a solo retrospective of Fusco’s works opened at Berlin’s KW Institute of Contemporary Art in September 2023, accompanied by a monograph published by Thames & Hudson.

Wanuri Kahiu is an award-winning filmmaker, speaker, and science fiction writer. Her film RAFIKI was the first Kenyan film to screen at Cannes, earning global recognition. Named one of TIME’s 100 Next in 2019, she is a cultural leader for the World Economic Forum and an advocate for freedom of expression. Through AFROBUBBLEGUM, Kahiu champions fun, fierce and frivolous African art. She directed WASHINGTON BLACK for Hulu/20th Century Fox, Netflix’s LOOK BOTH WAYS, and is set to direct Disney’s ONCE ON THIS ISLAND.

Zeresenay “Zee” Berhane Mehari is an award winning writer/director born and raised in Ethiopia. Zee moved to the U.S. to attend film school and founded Haile—Addis Pictures to produce his first narrative feature film, Difret, which was Executive Produced by Angelina Jolie and won Audience Awards at both the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals. His next feature film, Sweetness in the Belly, based on the international best-selling novel of the same name by Camilla Gibb set during the Ethiopian revolution in the 1970s, was a Canadian-Irish coproduction starring Dakota Fanning and Yahya Abdul-Mateen and had its world premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was distributed by Entertainment One and Gravitas Ventures, and was the first feature film helmed by an African director financed by Canada’s public Telefilms fund.

Zee was most recently co-founder and Head of Original Content for Kana Television, the popular free-to-air, private satellite entertainment TV channel in Ethiopia which was recently acquired by Canal Plus. Zee is currently Head of Production and a co-founder of A51 Pictures, an independent film production company based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is currently developing a slate of films for the local and international market. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

The Otolith Group is an award-winning artist led collective founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. Their moving image, audio works, performances and installations are characterized by an engagement with cosmogonic aesthetics that evoke the interscalar imagination of differentiated planetarity. Their works explores science fictions of the present that entail the work of temporal anomalisation, anthropic inversion and synthetic alienation.

Recent solo exhibitions include, We will move to the land of birds as a flock of previous humans, Greengrassi, London (2024); I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another, Greengrassi, London (2023); What the Owl Knows, Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2023); What the Owl Knows, Secession, Vienna (2022-2023); Xenogenesis, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2022-2023), Sharjah Art Foundation (2021-22), Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2020), Buxton Art Gallery, Melbourne (2020), Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2020), and Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2019); O Horizon, The Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2018); Reconstruction of Story 2, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2018); The Radiant, Art Gallery at Miyauch, Tokyo, (2017); In the Year of the Quiet Sun, Casco: Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht (2014); Novaya Zemlya, Museo Serralves, Porto (2014); Medium Earth, Roy and Edna Disney at Cal Arts Theater, Los Angeles (2013).

Group exhibitions include, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Neubauer Collegium, Chicago (2024 – 2025); Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Art Institute Chicago (2024 –2025); What the Owl Knows, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2024); Avantgarde and Liberation, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (2024); TECHNO WORLDS, Photobastei, Zurich (2024), Centro de Arte y Cultura Futurama, New Mexico City (2023); Goethe-Institut, Los Angeles (2022-2023); Goethe-Institut, Montreal (2022); Knockdown Center, New York, (2022); Bauhaus imaginista, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata (2021); Le Deracinement. On Diasporic Imaginations, Z33, Hasselt (2021); CC World, Haus Der Kulturen de Welt, Berlin (2020); Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah (2019); bauhaus imaginista, Haus der Kulteren der Welt, Berlin (2019); Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Carnegie Museum of Modern Art, Pittsburgh, (2018); We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal. Of, With, Towards, On Julius Eastman, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2018); Mondialité, Villa Empain-Fondation Boghossian, Brussels (2017); Tanawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13, (2017); The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), Gwangju Biennale, (2016); Endless Shout, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, (2015); The Freedom Principle*, Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now*, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015); Rare Earth, Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art, Vienna (2015).