Navild Acosta is a Creative Capital Artist, Disability Futures Fellow and an internationally acclaimed artist and activist based between the US and Europe. Being transgender, queer and black-dominican has inspired his community based work. Navild's written work is featured in Performance Journal, VICE, Brooklyn Magazine, Apogee Journal, BOMB Magazine. Navild's performance works have debuted at Matadero Madrid, Tate Modern, Tanz im August and Kunst-Werke Institut, Wiener Festwochen, The David Roberts Art Foundation, The Kimmel Center, MOMA PS1, Studio Museum, New Museum. Navild has collaborated with Alicia Keys, Fannie Sosa, BEARCAT, Lyle Ashton-Harris & Ralph Lemon.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher from London.
She is co-author of 'A FLY Girl's Guide to University' (Verve Poetry Press, 2019), author of 'Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power' (Pluto Press, 2019) and 'Experiments in Imagining Otherwise', forthcoming from Hajar Press in 2021. She is a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective and the recipient of the 2020 techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership between The Stuart Hall Foundation, CREAM and Westminster School of Arts. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination, its relationship to futurity, political demands and imaginative-revolutionary potential. Her latest short story, "Red" was shortlisted for the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing prize. She tweets at @lolaolufemi_ and is represented by Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander Associates. Alongside writing, she facilitates reading groups/workshops, occasionally curates and is volunteer co-ordinator at the Feminist Library in South London.
Dr. Francesca Sobande is a lecturer, researcher, and writer who explores the power and politics of media and the marketplace, including issues concerning identity, intersecting inequalities, and imagination. Her research particularly focuses on digital remix culture, Black diaspora and archives, feminism, creative work, pop culture, and devolved nations.
Current writing projects:
Black oot here: black lives in Scotland (zed/bloomsbury)
The revolution will not be digital branding [title tbc] (university of california press)
Lolo Arziki was born in Cape Verde and moved to Portugal at the age of 13; now living between Portugal and Luxembourg.
Lolo attended the African Studies degree for a year where a teacher gave Lolo the book History of Black Africa by Joseph Ki-Zerbo. Reading this book Lolo became interested in the History of Art in Africa, questioning the Eurocentric perspective and deciding to opt for activism through art. Lolo graduated in Cinema from the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar and completed a Master's degree in Aesthetics and Artistic Studies at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. As a black feminist, Lolo develops work exploring themes suchas sexuality, blackness, gender and aesthetic experimentation. Lolo addresses these themes in films, also advocating for the legal prohibition of homophobia in Cape Verde, where homosexuality only ceased to be a crime in 2004. In 2016, Lolo began performing with the video performance Relatos de Uma Mulher Nada Púdica, portraying the intimate and personal experience of a woman and Lolo’s sexual affirmation within the Cape Verdean cultural context as an LGBTI rights activist.
