Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
Kwesi Abbensetts is a New York-based photographer who hails from the Corentyne Coast of Guyana. He moved to the United States in 1995. Portraiture has been Abbensetts’ main photographic foundation. He is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography. His work has been included in Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore (2011); African and African-Caribbean Design Diaspora Festival, London (2011); Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark (2009); Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, New York (2010); and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York (2010).
Temilola Alanamu is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. She has a master’s degree in Women and International Development and a doctorate in History. Her current research centres on Childhood and Memory in Nigeria. She has written various articles on women and childhood in Sub-Saharan Africa in academic journals, edited volumes, and encyclopaedias. She is currently working on her first monograph titled “The Gendered Lifecycle in Nineteenth-Century Abeokuta.”
Grace Aneiza Ali is an independent curator, faculty in the Department of Art and Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and Editorial Director of OF NOTE, an award-winning online magazine on art and activism. Her essays on photography have been published in Nueva Luz Journal and Small Axe Journal, among others. In 2014, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellowship. Highlights of her curatorial work include Guest Curator for the 2014 Addis Ababa Foto Fest; Guest Curator of the Fall 2013 Nueva Luz Photographic Journal; and Host of the ‘Visually Speaking’ photojournalism series at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center. Ali is a World Economic Forum ‘Global Shaper’ and Fulbright Scholar. She holds a MA in Africana Studies from New York University and a BA in English Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Ulli Beier (1922–2011) was a German-born scholar who fostered appreciation of African art and literature as the founder (1957) and coeditor (1957–68) of the Nigerian literary periodical Black Orpheus, which provided an outlet for creative writing by Africans and West Indians. After completing his studies at the University of London (BA, 1948), Beier was appointed (1950) associate professor of extramural studies at Nigeria’s University College, Ibadan (now the University of Ibadan). In 1961 he helped a group of young writers in Ibadan and Oshogbo (where he lived) organize the nonprofit Mbari Mbayo Club, which eventually encompassed an art school, a theatre, and a publisher. In the late 1960s Beier accepted a teaching position in Papua New Guinea, where he established the literary periodical Kovave. He returned to Nigeria in 1971 to become [End Page 166] director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ife. Three years later he became the first director (1974–78) of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in Port Moresby. He was also the founding director (1981–85, 1989–96) of the Iwalewa House at the University of Bayreuth (Ger.) Africa Centre. The author of numerous books, Beier was particularly admired for his English translations from Yoruba, including Yoruba Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional Poems (1970) and Yoruba Myths (1980). [Bio adapted from Encyclopædia Britannica Online. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ulli-Beier]
Khadija Benn grew up in the bauxite mining town of Linden, Guyana and later settled in the capital city Georgetown. She received a BA in Geography from the University of Guyana, and postgraduate certification in Applied Digital Geography & GIS from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. In the last six years she has undertaken projects that have enabled her to travel throughout Guyana, including working as a cartographer and spatial analyst in areas such as land use planning, community development, and heritage preservation. She discovered her affinity for photography at age twenty-three, eventually favoring conceptual portraiture for achieving creative balance and self-expression. She has also produced a body of documentary work that focuses on the diversity of Guyanese people, places, and cultural experiences. Currently Benn is pursuing a Master of Science in Geo-Informatics at the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, Trinidad.
Sandra...
