Heineken Affinity Award Profile: Akosua Adoma Owusu

Read all the profiles so far. An initiative through our Tribeca All Access® program, the Affinity Award celebrates emerging and established African-American filmmakers by creating further awareness and dialogue around their work. Learn more here. Along with the Affinity Award winners receiving an initial grant, you can now vote for one filmmaker to win a $20,000 cash award, which will be announced during the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. Vote here.

An American filmmaker of Ghanaian descent, Akosua Adoma Owusu bases her work around personal diaspora, history and cultural representation. Her work has been showcased worldwide, including her award-winning short Drexciya, about an abandoned Olympic-sized public swimming pool and its mythical history. Owusu is currently developing her first feature, Black Sunshine, which looks at a complex love triangle. The project has been selected in Locarno's Open Doors program and found support from the Creative Capital Foundation. Asked what she wants audiences to get out of his filmmaking, Owusu says… "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."