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Akosua Adoma Owusu is an AMAA award-winning American avant-garde filmmaker of Ghanaian parentage. Producers of Owusu's first feature film Black Sunshine won France’s ARTE International Prize Award at the 2013 Durban FilmMart.
In 2013, The Huffington Post listed Owusu in “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know.†Her film Kwaku Ananse won the 2013 Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Short Film. Kwaku Ananse participated in French Cesar Film Academy Golden Nights Panorama program of Best Short Films of the year, organized with support from UNESCO, a program that selects notable short films awarded in 2013.
“Although filmmaking in Africa is extensive in scope, innovation, and diversity, in the UK, African films are rarely or only peripherally included in the programs of international festivals, instead they are relegated to a handful of specialist and niche African film festivals. Despite the challenges facing filmmaking in Africa, due to the complex, multileveled, and expensive nature of this form of creative expression, film has long been used by African directors as a way to tell African stories, represent and negotiate African identity, and as a form of entertainment, education, and awareness-raising.†If African cultures have long been the subject of ethnography then Owusu’s work illustrates the ways in which “ethnography still provides some challenges that can only be adequately met with experimental practice.†Owusu engages African storytelling traditions through cinema and major themes in her films include the complex relationship between location and identity in its many physical embodiments, especially hairstyling. In her artist’s statement Owusu writes, “The hairstyles I experimented with in my life - the Afro, Braids, and hair straightening - were physical manifestations of my warring triple consciousness.†She continues, “The African immigrant is unlike the African American who has a double consciousness. The African immigrant has a triple consciousness.†And “her ‘warring consciousness’ as she describes it, becomes the point of departure for her [2009] film me broni ba. Using hair as a medium of culture, she examines African and African-American identities and ideologies in an effort to resolve their differences,†writes Beti Ellerson. Owusu has said that "through my filmmaking, I hope 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 unconventionalized discourses of race in its service. By creating complex contradictions, I hope that 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's like to find oneself, while being foreign in a community, then perhaps I can help that new meaning come to light." Nzingha Kendall underscores Owusu’s concerns, writing that she “explores how blackness is intertwined with displacement and memory and how they engage with the construction of individual and collective identity.†Currently, Owusu is based in Accra, Ghana. Upcoming projects include Black Sunshine, a Creative Capital project about a complex love triangle.
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