Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer and cinematographer whose films have screened worldwide in prestigious film festivals, museums, galleries, universities and microcinemas since 2005. Her work addresses the collision of identities, where the African immigrant located in the United States has a "triple consciousness." Owusu interprets Du Bois' notion of double consciousness and creates a third identity or consciousness, representing the diverse consciousness of women and African immigrants interacting in African, white American, and black American culture. Named by Indiewire as one of the 6 Avant-Garde Female Filmmakers Who Redefined Cinema, and one of The Huffington Post's Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know, Akosua Adoma Owusu is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. Founded in 2007, her company, Obibini Pictures LLC produces unconventional films about multicultural experiences including Reluctantly Queer and Kwaku Ananse, which received the 2013 African Movie Academy Award for Best Short Film. Reluctantly Queer was nominated for the Golden Bear and Teddy Award at the Berlinale, Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. In 2017, Obibini Pictures, LLC produced On Monday of Last Week, a film adaptation of a short story in renowned author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's collection, "The Thing Around Your Neck." The film secured a nomination at the 2017 African Movie Academy Awards and was supported in part by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Creative Capital Foundation. Owusu's film work has received support from Tribeca All Access, IFP, Focus Features Africa First, the Art Matters Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Berlinale World Cinema Fund among others. Recent projects include reviving Ghana's historic Rex Cinema as a creative space for art, music, and film. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Fowler Museum, Yale University Film Study Center, and Indiana University Bloomington, home of the Black Film Center/Archive. Owusu holds MFA degrees in Film & Video and Fine Art from California Institute of the Arts and received her BA in Media Studies and Studio Art with distinction from the University of Virginia, where she studied under the mentorship of prolific avant-garde filmmaker, Kevin Jerome Everson. She divides her time between Ghana and New York, where she works as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
She is the first baby born in Northern Virginia on January 1, 1984.
She is the protg of prolific cinematographer Kevin Jerome Everson.
I would like to insert myself in the tradition of African storytelling,through cinematic language. .
