We have been keeping tabs on the career and projects of the extraordinary international filmmaker and contemporary artist Akosua Adoma Owusu, whose films are in the permanent collections in the Whitney Museum in New York, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Yale University Film Study Center, and the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Her work has has been showcased worldwide in museums, galleries, theaters and film festivals, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, Rotterdam, Centre Pompidou Paris and the London Film Festival to name a few (most recently, the filmmaker was involved in a project in Vietnam). She has also been awarded with several honors, including, earlier this year, named one of the recipients of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Her experimental feature film, currently in the works, titled “Black Sunshine," was selected as one of four films to receive production financing from the World Cinema Fund – an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Goethe-Institut-Film.
Owusu’s stated goal is to use her work to "… open audiences up to a new dialogue between the continents of Africa and America; one that incorporates more than just stereotypes, but includes both conventionalized and un-conventionalized discourses of race in its service, by creating complex contradictions."
She also hopes that, through her filmmaking, "a new meaning can emerge and be deposited into the universal consciousness. If I can do this by creating an experience for the audience that enables them to experience what it is like to find oneself, while being foreign in a community, then perhaps I can help that new meaning come to light."
The Virginia native who was born to Ghanaian parents, got her MFA in Film, Video and Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, and she was named by The Huffington Post as one of their "30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know."
Tonight, Monday Dec. 14, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will present "An Evening with Akosua Adoma Owusu," which will consist of a program of four of her short films, "Bus Nut," "Kwaku Ananse," "Me Broni Ba" and "Intermittent Delight," as well as a conversation with the filmmaker in attendance, after the screenings, during which she will also discuss the progress of her feature film, "Black Sunshine," among other things.
To find out more on the event, go to MoMA’s website here; and check out Ms. Owusu’s own website here.
