© Carey MacArthur

BIOGRAPHY

Akosua Adoma Owusu is an award-winning filmmaker, producer, and educator whose films explore diasporic identity, memory, and belonging through the lens of triple consciousness. Her work examines the layered realities of African, American, and transnational experience across experimental cinema, documentary, and narrative forms.

Her films have screened extensively at festivals and institutions worldwide, including the New York Film Festival, Berlinale Shorts, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, and the National Gallery of Art.

Her work has been featured in ARTFORUM, Frieze, e-flux journal, Black Camera, Film Comment, and the International Review of African American Art. Her film Kwaku Ananse (2013) won the Africa Movie Academy Award and later screened at the Venice Biennale. Reluctantly Queer (2016) premiered at Berlinale Shorts and was nominated for the Teddy Award. Her films are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

Owusu is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital award, and the Film at Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists. She has participated in residencies at the Camargo Foundation, Villa Sträuli, MacDowell, and the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia, and served as a U.S. Arts Envoy in Ghana.

In 2021–2022, she was the Robert Gardner Fellow at Harvard University’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.

She is currently an Assistant Professor of Film at Howard University and the founder and artistic director of Black Light: A Howard Short Film Showcase, an independently produced, faculty-led public screening program presented through her company, Obibini Pictures. She is also the founder of Save the Rex, an initiative to revive the historic Rex Cinema in Accra, Ghana as a space for film, culture, and public dialogue.