Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer. Aiming to create a third cinematic space or consciousness, Owusu explores the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms, ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. In her works, feminism and African identities interact in African, white American and black American cultural spaces.
Born in 1984 in the United States to Ghanian parents, she currently lives and works in New York, and lectures at Harvard University and at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She holds a BA in Media Studies and Studio Art from the University of Virginia (2005) and an MFA in Fine Art as well as Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts (2008). Since 2005, Owusu's films have screened internationally in festivals and museums, including the New York Film Festival, Berlinale Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, and the BFI London Film Festival. Named by IndieWire as one of six preeminent “avant-garde female filmmakers who redefined cinema,” she was a featured artist of the 56th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Her recent projects include Welcome to the Jungle (2019), a multi-channel video installation made in collaboration with the CCA Wattis Institute.
Her work can be found on the Criterion Channel and in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, among others. Owusu's awards and grants include the Gardner Film Study Fellowship (2021), the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists (2020), Camargo Foundation Fellowship (2016), Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2015), Africa Movie Academy Award (2013), MacDowell Colony fellowship (2013) and Creative Capital fellowship (2012).
© Akosua Adoma Owusu
