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, Berlin International Film Festival, 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.

Selected Honors, Fellowships & Residencies

• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
• Berlinale World Cinema Fund
• Sarah Jacobson Film Grant
• Tribeca Film Institute Filmmaker Profile

Collections & Affiliations

• Whitney Museum of American Art, Artist Collection
• Berlinale Talents, Mentor
• Camargo Foundation, Residency
• MacDowell, Artist Residency
• Villa Sträuli / Kurzfilmtage, Residency

Professional recognition & juried programs

• Lincoln Center Awards for Emerging Artists
• Cultured Magazine, Venice Biennale Artist List

Talks, lectures & programs

• Batalha Centro de Cinema, Lecture (Portugal)
• TIFF Higher Learning (Canada)
• Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto (Canada)
• CINUSP, University of São Paulo, Women of the Avant-Garde (Brazil)
• Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Spain)
• Moderna Museet, CinemAfrica (Sweden)
• Sharjah Film Platform, Artist Talk (UAE))
• UnionDocs: Shorts & Influences, A Letter to the World, Memory Palaces, and A Kaleidoscope of Ideas and Doubts
• Amherst College, Spring Arts Festival Lecture
• MassArt Ciné Culture
• University of Colorado Boulder, First Person Cinema
• UC Santa Cruz, Center for Documentary Arts and Research
• Ann Arbor Film Festival
• Athens International Film & Video Festival

Profiles

• UNESCO, The African Film Industry Report
• U.S. Department of State, Arts Envoy Program
• This Is Africa, Artist Profile
• MacDowell, Guggenheim Fellows Feature

Video interviews

• Artforum, Triple Consciousness
• Focus Features Africa First
• Houston Cinema Arts Festival
• The New School, Doc Talks