The new Artistic Advisory Board comes to continue the experiences of Culturescapes 2023 Sahara and to support and complement the work of the curatorial team of the next Saharan edition in 2025. The six new members are invited to share in-depth expertise on the sociocultural landscape, history, and current cultural practices in the region of Northern, Eastern, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Please meet (left to right)
Reem Allam is the Associate Director, Artistic Planning of The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. She has previously worked for six years as Executive Manager and Artistic Programmer of the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) in Egypt. She has also worked as Head of Cairo Industry Days at the Cairo International Film Festival. Allam holds a UK Master’s Degree in Arts, Festivals, and Cultural Management from QMU Edinburgh, and has been awarded the 2018 Finalist Social Impact Award by British Council's UK Alumni Awards. Over the past years, she has worked in several international festivals, including London's Shubbak Festival and AAF - Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and served as a juror for festivals such as Zürcher Theater Spektakel and Poland's Boska Komedia Festival.
Yarri Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-Ugandan writer, translator, and policy researcher. In 2023, she was a finalist for the US National Translation Award for her translation of Monique Ilboudo’s novel So Distant From my Life. That same year, she also co-edited Culturescapes’ anthology Sahara: A thousand paths into the future. Yarri’s essays and poetry have appeared in Africa Is A Country, Lolwe, The Republic, Brittle Paper, Poda Poda Stories, Courrier International, and Welt-Sichten. As a policy researcher, Yarri is a member of UNESCO’s 2005 Convention Expert Facility, providing cultural policy advice for diverse and thriving cultural sectors globally. Yarri lived in Burkina Faso from 2005 to 2022 and has traveled widely in West Africa. She is currently based in Italy.
N’Goné Fall is an independent curator and cultural policies specialist from Senegal. She was the editorial director of the contemporary African art magazine Revue Noire from 1994 to 2001. She is the author of strategic plans for national and international institutions. N’Goné was a professor at the Senghor University, Egypt; lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, South Africa, and Abdou Moumouni University, Niger. She was the General Commissioner of the Africa 2020 Season, a series of more than 1,500 cultural, scientific, and pedagogical events in France from December 2020 to September 2021.
Edwige Renée Dro is a writer, literary translator, and literary activist from Côte d’Ivoire. Her short stories have been widely anthologized. Through her interests in exploring linguistic justice via the Englishes and the Frenches spoken in Africa, she has been on the jury of prizes like the Caine Prize for African Writing, the PEN International Short Story Prize, and on the advisory board of the PEN/HEIM Translation Fund. Edwige is a 2019 Miles Morland Fellow and a 2021 Writing Fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program. In 2020, she founded 1949 the Library of Women’s Writings from Africa and the black world in Abidjan.
Elisa da Costa is a student in the Master's program of the Center for African Studies at Basel University. She is a versatile communication and media scientist exploring diverse topics, including transdisciplinarity, sustainability, Pan-Africanism, decolonization, critical thinking, diversity and inclusion, and entrepreneurship. She identifies herself as a dynamic professional working as a writer, researcher, communication expert, and facilitator. Elisa is actively involved in her podcast Blackfluencers, the "Heritage Concept" exhibition project, and co-curating the program for the tech conference "Forum de tecnologia e educaçao" in Luanda, Angola.
Dr. Fiona Siegenthaler is an art historian and social anthropologist with a specialization in the interdisciplinary field of contemporary African art, performance and visual culture. Since 2021, she is the Senior Curator at the Africa department of Linden-Museum Stuttgart. She conducted her PhD and postdoctoral research in Johannesburg and Kampala and has lectured for many years at the Institute for Social Anthropology, the Institute of Art History, and the Centre for African Studies in Basel (Switzerland). She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 2017/18, has engaged in various contemporary art institutions and initiatives in Switzerland and abroad, and has published widely.
Photos:
Reem Allam © Khaled Marzouk; Yarri Kamara © Anne Mimault; N’Goné Fall © F. Diouf PHOTOGRAPHY; Edwige Renée Dro © Adams Tusker; Elisa da Costa; Dr. Fiona Siegenthaler.
