• Matias Mariani

    • January 15, 2021
    • Posted by: Michael Umoh
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    After graduating from NYU Tisch School of the Arts Matias Mariani worked extensively as a producer in films such as Fish Dreams (Cannes’ Critics Week), Drained (Sundance), Adrift (Cannes Un Certain Regard). In 2014 Matias directed the documentary feature I Touched All Your Stuff, which had its world première at FID Marseille and won Best Editing at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, as well as being released theatrically both in Brazil and the US, followed by the fiction feature Shine Your Eyes, which had its premiere in the Panorama session of the 2020 Berlinale and was purchased by Netflix for worldwide release on July 2020, earning glowing reviews from The New York Times, Variety and Hollywood Reporter.

    As a scriptwriter Matias worked on I Bring it With me (best film at Brasília Film Festival), Pendular (FIPRESCI award at Berlinale 2017) and Shine Your Eyes (Berlinale 2020).

    Matias is currently writing and directed Cora, together with Gustavo Rosa Moura, a documentary-narrative hybrid set to be released in 2020.

    Watch Shine Your Eyes trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tY_ahX4Jv8

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  • Sophie Masipa

    • January 15, 2021
    • Posted by: Michael Umoh
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    Co-Founder and CEO, MwunganoESG

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  • Audu Maikori

    • January 15, 2021
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    Audu is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur, lawyer and creative industry expert. He is better known as the founder of Chocolate City Group- a media /entertainment company which is comprised of Chocolate City Media (Film,TV and content production), Chocolate City Kenya, CCX (live music space) and Chocolate City Music record label – one of the biggest record labels in Africa – and home to some of Africa’s most talented artistes including Grammy Nominated Femi Kuti, M.I Abaga, Dice Ailes, Ckay, Blaqbonez etc. In March 2019, Chocolate City Group signed a landmark partnership deal with Warner Music Group (one of the biggest record labels in the world) to bring the Warner catalogue to Africa and promote the Chocolate City catalogue and artists across 60 new markets globally.

    In 2018, he was invited to join the board of Unanimous Games LLC – a 360 Esports digital company based in New York – that focuses on mobile game development, Esports activations, Content creation , STEM Education and talent management. As Executive Director and Partnerships lead, his portfolio includes companies like Rocnation, BET Networks, PUMA, AfroIsland Initiative and the Government of Barbados.

    Born in Kaduna, Nigeria , he attended the prestigious King’s College Lagos and was called to the Nigerian Bar in 2001. He has served as legal counsel in several corporations including Chief Afe Babalola SAN & Co, Leasing Company of Nigeria (a subsidiary of Bank of Industry), Abuja Markets Management Limited and was Senior Legal consultant with CPCS Transcom International (a Canadian infrastructure advisory firm) where he was lead counsel for major Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE)/World Bank funded projects including the privatization of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) reforms, Abuja Rail Mass Transit system and the Lagos Blue Line Rail Mass Transit project.

    He is a passionate advocate for social justice and entrepreneurship as the key to economic empowerment. He has served on various entrepreneurial judging panels including – Microsoft’s Passion to Empire, Etisalat Prize for Innovation, She Leads Africa, Chivas The Venture Competition and served as judge on the M.I.T Inclusive Innovation Global competition in 2018 and 2019.

    Audu sits on several boards including Recycle Points (a recycling and waste management company), Global Rights Africa (a human rights and advocacy NGO) , Nigerian British Chamber of Commerce, Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and is the Chairman of Beat Drone (a drone tech company).

    He is an alumnus of the University of Jos, Pan African University, Lagos and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of management, Boston respectively.

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  • Usher Komugisha

    • January 15, 2021
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    Usher Komugisha is a Ugandan multimedia sports journalist that has a passion for covering sports majorly in Africa.

    She is currently working as a Basketball Writer for FIBA and an African Football Reporter for Soccer Africa, the leading magazine show on the continent airing on SuperSport TV every Thursday night. She is also an analyst on NTV Press Box, voted as the best sports show in Uganda for two years straight – 2018 and 2019.

    Playing basketball, rugby, and golf as well as excelling at track and field from a very young age has shaped her journalism journey and propelled her to a deep understanding of reporting about sports and its power to change the narrative about Africa.

    A book addict and linguist, who loves to travel, she speaks 18 languages and is currently learning Zulu and Igbo. Last year, she was selected among the Top 100 Most Influential Young Africans and continues to use her platforms to inspire youth on the continent. She is also an activist for Women In Sport.

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  • Ibrahim Mahama

    • January 15, 2021
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    Ibrahim Mahama (b.1987) in Tamale Ghana is an artist who lives and works in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale, Ghana. He started his practice through his interest in the history of materials and architecture. Failure and delay through specific forms always inform his choice of sites which he believes the works do not only occupy but are also occupied within the works/objects. Residues and points of chaos registered as marks within the forms he selects, they present us alternative perspectives of looking into the materials/Labour conditions of society. Form is important. His work has included objects from jute sacks used to transport commodities to the point of decay and later sewn together with a network of collaborators under specific Labour conditions which is then superimposed on architecture. The politics of the hand and it’s parallel relation with architectural forms become a lot more evident.

    His work, a straight line through the carcass of history has also dealt with forms related to the second world war and bacteria life. His work has been included in the 56, 57 and 58 Venice Biennale, documenta 14 Athens and Kassel, Orderly Disorderly, Accra, Images An Age of Our Own Making, Denmark, the island is what the sea surrounds, Valletta 18, Malta and Spectacles Spectations, Kumasi Ghana and Labour of Many at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town, Parliament of Ghosts at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and currently at the 22nd Sydney Biennale. He finished a year residency with the DAAD in Berlin in 2018. In march 2019 he opened SCCA Tamale, which is an artist run space, built and dedicated to retrospectives of practices which emerged from the 20thcentury. His current interests are using specific architectural forms within history in the formation of spaces inspired by the potentialities and failures of modernity.

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  • Chid Liberty

    • January 15, 2021
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    Chid Liberty is an award-winning social entrepreneur and impact investor. In 2010 he founded Liberty & Justice, Africa’s first Fair Trade Certified apparel manufacturer. In addition to his work at Liberty & Justice, Chid served as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Liberia’s Monrovia Business Startup Center (BSC). The BSC was founded by Spark, a Dutch NGO, for whom Chid managed the Ignite Fund – an equity investment fund that makes strategic investments in companies with high growth potential in conflict-affected states. He also speaks internationally on social entrepreneurship and impact investing – recently at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton Universities, as well as the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and IE in Madrid, Spain. Chid is currently leading L&J through its rapid expansion and rebranding as Made In Africa.

    Chid was recognized by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in her 2011 State of the Nation Address for his leadership in shaping trade policy and indigenous Liberian entrepreneurship. He is a recipient of the 2018 Ashoka Fabric of Change Fellowship – a C&A Foundation sponsored grant awarded to social entrepreneurs pursuing systemic change in retail supply chains. He was also named by Quartz (a division of Atlantic Magazine) as one of 30 groundbreaking African Innovators of 2017. He was a 2014 Salzburg Global Fellow, a 2011 SVN Social Innovation Award winner, a 2010 Cordes Fellow, and a Yoxi Portfolio SIR (Social Innovation Rockstar). Chid also works as an advisor and board member to a number of high-impact organizations including B Lab, The Unreasonable Group and Unreasonable Capital, and, most importantly – the Georgie Badiel Foundation, which was founded by his wife, former Miss Africa, model, author, and activist Georgie Badiel-Liberty to bring clean drinking water to communities in her home country of Burkina Faso and her adopted second home of Liberia.

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  • Mark Lewis

    • January 15, 2021
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    Mark Lewis is the founder and CEO of Bravig a content rights and distribution firm based in the UK with a focus on Africa. Over the last decade the company has sold over 5,000 hours of African specific and International content to include lifestyle, reality and family entertainment. Bravig has distributed local language and dubbed programming to SABC, Canal+, Azam and over 30 ancillary Pan-African broadcasters.

    The group has a commitment to sport; both local and international programming and plans to deliver live mobile and OTT offerings across 2021 into 15 Sub-Saharan countries. Bravig consults in raising capital for media rights deals and streaming platforms, and sees the future expansion on the continent as pivotal in the global content race. We are committed to empowering local broadcasters and content owners internationally, through effective distribution.

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  • Amani Kiflemariam

    • January 15, 2021
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  • Bronwyn Katz

    • January 15, 2021
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    Bronwyn Katz is an award winning multi-disciplinary South African artist. Incorporating sculpture, installation, video and performance, Bronwyn’s practice engages with concepts of mapping, memory and language relative to land and culture. Conceptually, her works refer to the political context of their making, embodying subtle acts of resistance that draw attention to the social constructions and boundaries that continue to define those spaces. Bronwyn is also a founding member of iQhiya, an art collective and network of black women artists and cultural workers in South Africa formed in June 2015 in Cape Town.

    Bronwyn completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015, receiving the Simon Gerson Prize at the University of Cape Town for a distinctive body of work related to collective history and memory linked to the spaces and objects around them. Bronwyn has held a number of solo exhibitions and participated in several group exhibitions including:

    The 12th Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal (2016)
    Le jour qui vient – Galerie des Galeries in Paris (2017)
    Tell Freedom – Kunsthal KAdE in Amersvoort (2018)
    Sculpture – Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis in Mauritius (2018)
    A Silent Line, Lives Here at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018) 
    Salvaged Letter at Peres Projects in Berlin (2019) 
    Blank Projects in Cape Town (2019)
    Là où les eaux se mêlent (Where the water mingles) (Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, 2019)
    The Empathy Lab (Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, 2019)
    Material Insanity – Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakech (2019)
    Road to the Unconscious – Peres Projects in Berlin (2019)

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  • Nky Iweka

    • January 15, 2021
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    Nky Iweka a.k.a. ‘The Executive Mama Put’ has spent almost a decade redefining Nigerian food and challenging the way in which Nigerian food is cooked and presented.

    She opened her first restaurant, Pitanga, two years ago. Situated in West Kensington in London, U.K., it bills itself as offering “Nigerian Food With a Twist”. Serving traditional fare such as Egusi and Okro as well as inventions of hers using Nigerian ingredients in new ways such as her signature Jollof Balls and Prawn Akara. Pitanga boasts an eclectic client base and is fast becoming a destination restaurant for Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike.

    “One of my biggest joys is looking around the restaurant and seeing people of various ethnicities eating Nigerian food. I show them how to eat with their hands. It’s part of the Pitanga Experience. Our open-plan kitchen means we can quickly respond to customer needs. My teenage dream is eventually coming true! The next step is to spread the Pitanga Experience.”

    A mother of two, she started off her professional career as a management consultant at Unisys and PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she was lucky enough to eat her way round the world (in addition to working in Finance Transformation for Blue-chip Companies, mostly in the Telecoms Sector).

    “Worldwide, chefs are constantly reinventing their national dishes and creating truly beautiful masterpieces, worthy of any artist. I wanted the same for our food”.

    Her first book, ‘Quintessentially Efik Recipes’ which showcases the dishes and culture of the Efik people of Southern Nigeria was published in 2014. Other books on Nigerian cuisine and her culinary adventures are in the pipeline.

    Key Media & Appearances
    ● ‘Where’s My African Takeaway?’ BBC Food Chain (Nov 2017)
    ● Guest Chef, Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, UAE (Apr 2016)
    ● Annual Igbo Conference: Panel Speaker (Ap 2014 & Featured Speaker Apr 2016)
    ● ‘Nigerian Food Pops up in London’, BBC (Dec 2015)
    ● CRBC, Nigeria (Sept 2015)

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