Artist and Filmmaker Talk: Young Joo Lee and Akosua Adoma Owusu

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Join us at 7:00 pm EST for two presentations by artists and visiting faculty members to the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Young Joo Lee, and Akosua Adoma Owusu. This program will be moderated by Olivia Crough (she/her), a PhD candidate in Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. 

Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer. She currently lectures at Harvard University and at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Aiming to create a third cinematic space or consciousness, Owusu explores the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms, ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. In her works, feminism and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces.

Since 2005, Owusu's films have screened internationally in festivals and museums, including the New York Film Festival, Berlinale Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, and the BFI London Film Festival. Named by IndieWire as one of six preeminent “avant-garde female filmmakers who redefined cinema,” she was a featured artist of the 56th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. 

Her recent projects include Welcome to the Jungle (2019), a multi-channel video installation made in collaboration with the CCA Wattis Institute.

Her work can be found on the Criterion Channel and in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, among others.

Owusu's awards and grants include the Gardner Film Study Fellowship (2021), the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists (2020), Camargo Foundation Fellowship (2016), Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2015), Africa Movie Academy Award (2013), MacDowell Colony fellowship (2013) and Creative Capital fellowship (2012).She holds a BA in Media Studies and Studio Art from the University of Virginia (2005) and an MFA in Fine Art as well as Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts (2008).

The Harvard Film Archive will be screening several works by Akosua Adoma Owusu on Monday, March 28, 2022, at 7pm. More information on this event can be found through the Harvard Film Archive here.

Born in 1984 in Alexandria, US, Owusu currently lives and works in New York.

Young Joo Lee uses animation, performance, sculpture, and digital technologies to explore the concept of the “other” and the “otherness” depicted in history, mythology, and contemporary media culture, often by starting from her personal experiences as a woman, a South Korean, and a first-generation immigrant who lives between three different cultures and languages in Europe and in the USA. Her current projects investigate the value of labor, authorship, and creativity in a society that is increasingly becoming automated and controlled by a capitalistic system.

Lee’s work has been featured at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art- Seoul, the Drawing Center, Seoul National University Museum of Art, Bronx Art Space, Curitiba Biennial, Cairo Video Festival, Museum of Modern Art Zollamt- Frankfurt, and Interdisciplinary Arts Festival Tokyo. Lee was the Harvard College Fellow in Media Practice (2018-20), Macdowell Fellow (2021), Fulbright Scholar in Sculpture & Digital Media (2015-18) and a recipient of HP Blended Reality Grant (2017), DAAD (German Academic Exchange Program) artist scholarship (2010-12). She is currently a Harvard Film Study Center fellow and an artist-in-residence at the Boston Center for the Arts. Lee holds a MFA in Sculpture at Yale University and a MFA in Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule Frankfurt.

Olivia Crough (she/her) is a writer, occasional curator/programmer, and PhD candidate in Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard. Her academic work centers on artists' uses of moving images and print media in activist and revolutionary contexts, and her research interests span left internationalism, the history of media studies, and the financialization of education and art. She has recently written for MoMA, the Beirut Art Center, and e-flux, and is completing a dissertation on the Soviet avant garde artist Varvara Stepanova.