Growing up in Ghana, Norway, Hong Kong and the United States, Nuotama Bodomo says she became a filmmaker due to her migrant childhood. After early successes in cinema production, she began to move away from text as the dominant mode of knowledge towards an exploration of film from a perspective of afro-indigenous visuality that goes beyond the ocular. Whether focusing on the precarity of Black life in the United States via a game-show leitmotif, reimagining Zambian participation in the space race, or examining the feminine gaze and non-ocular wisdom, she draws upon her encyclopedic cinematic knowledge enabling her to compose a visual language specific to each work. Celebrated internationally in festival, streaming, and museum contexts, she is currently in post-production on a docu-hybrid, afrofuturist contemporary retelling of the legend of Yennenga, a forgotten warrior princess from 12th century Ghana.

photo: Abdul-Haqq Mahama