Ufuoma Essi

Ufuoma Essi Is a video artist and filmmaker from Lewisham, South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image as well as photography and sound. Her work revolves around Black feminist epistemology and the configuration of displaced histories.The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of political and historical narratives.

By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-centre the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of black women. Drawing from a range of influences including black popular culture, films, music, historical texts and black feminist theory from writers such as Claudia Jones to Daphne Brooks.

Essi’s work also seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and explores intersectional themes of race, gender, class and sexuality. Ufuoma’s films have been screened and exhibited at film festivals, institutions and galleries in the UK and abroad such as the Barbican, South London Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, Black Star Film Festival Festival, Maysles Documentary Center, CinemAfrica Film Festival and Chisenhale Studios.

Ufuoma has worked as a freelance film programmer and programmed screenings with the Barbican and Bernie Grant Arts Centre. She is also member of the South London Gallery based Black women and POC non-binary collective Narration Group where she has co-curated exhibitions and public programmes.