Celia C. Peters is an Oakland-based filmmaker and artist who creates visceral stories about complex characters. The vibe is Eve's Bayou meets Black Mirror; Black Nerd meets Rick Owens; Fresh Prince of Bel-Air meets New Wave; Soul Train meets The Factory. Her work is stylized; her style is avant-garde. Art, science, design and fashion are the key ingredients of Peters' oeuvre.
Peters Is currently developing her afrofuturist science fiction feature film GODSPEED with creative producer Gabrielle Glore. She is the creator, writer, director and editor of DOMESTICATED, an afrofuturist sci-fi audio drama currently available on major podcast platforms. She is currently serving as a Cultural Strategist in Government for the City of Oakland, working directly with the African American Museum at Oakland to creatively reimagine their permanent exhibit "Visions Toward Tomorrow" and creating both extended reality (XR) and narrative content drawn from the Black History of Oakland. She was the curator of the Urban Afrofuturism Film Program at the 2022 San Francisco Urban Film Festival and was curator of "Building Black Worlds" as part of the Mothership Exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California. She also curated of Blackness Revisualized, WNET/AllArts.org’s inaugural afrofuturist film festival, which runs through early 2022. Peters is also director of Shutdown, a historical documentary produced by Ohio State University, which was completed in 2023. She is an Advisor to the Sundance Co//ab courses "Beyond the First Act - Finishing Your First Draft" and “Writing Your First Act!” taught by Deborah Goodwin and previously, “Screenwriting: Crafting Your Sci-Fi Feature” taught by Philip Eisner.
In 2019-2020, Peters was a lecturer at Ohio State University, teaching screenwriting and Black Visual Culture and Popular Media. She is also the creator and instructor of the B.A.M.N. (By Any Means Necessary) Make Your Short Film! filmmaking course and Screenwriting Basics course that she has taught to youth and adults in partnership with various organizations.
She moderated THE COSMIC SYNTHESIS OF SUN RA AND AFROFUTURISM: ORDER OUT OF CHAOS, Harlem Stage's kick-off of a year-long celebration of Sun Ra and Afrofuturism. Peters was also a featured artist at the 2019 Social Muscle Club in Berlin, and a 2019 Artist Residency at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies at the University of Iowa. Peters curated the futurist art exhibit "Futures for the Rest of Us: LA" in partnership with DUST in February 2019 in Los Angeles. In 2018, she delivered a keynote speech at the NAACP National Convention and was selected for and participated in the Talent Lab at the Reykjavik International Film Festival with sci-fi feature project Godspeed. The same year, Peters curated and screened FAR OUT BLACK/The West Coast Edition, a program of sci-fi short films by Black directors, at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. She also curated the original version of “Futures for the Rest of Us,” a group exhibit of futurist art by artists typically underrepresented in leading science fiction stories at Blockfort in Columbus, OH. She presented “Science Fiction: The Liberation Genre” at Miami University in Oxford, OH. She is also creator and producer of the panel REPRESENT: The Rise of Characters of Color in Sci-Fi TV & Film, which took place at the 2017 New York Comic Con. Peters also curated and produced the original version of FAR OUT BLACK: An Evening of Afrofuturist Short Film, which took place at the 2017 Afropunk Festival. The same year, she also completed the final cut of her sci-fi short film thriller Roxë15 and was awarded a post-production residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts for her short sci-fi film, MISSION.
In 2015, Peters’ feature script, Roxë15, was selected for participation in CultivEight, a feature film development incubator sponsored by the NEA Art Works Program. She was awarded a 2012 residency at Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Midlothian, Scotland. Her psychologically inspired, character-driven screenwriting has been both prize-winning and recognized in competition. Her experimental short film “FIOFY [Figure It Out For Yourself]” (2011) was featured as an installation piece in ‘Conjuration,’ an exhibit in tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York City. "FIOFY" was featured in the FAME Film/Arts Festival in London in April 2013. Her filmmaker credits also include the short documentary piece "Flipsides of the Black Musical Experience" (2013), the experimental performance piece, “Poem in Motion (2011),” the short documentary “Rethinking Beauty (2011),” and “Editing Uptown (2010),” a featurette on the nationally distributed DVD of the indie film, “Uptown.” In 2007, Peters produced a half-hour segment, “The State of Hip-Hop” for WHUT/PBS and her short narrative film “Breakthrough" (2006), was broadcast nationally on BET’s The Best Shorts series. Peters is also the creator and producer of the dramatic reading series “The Next 15 Minutes (TM),” and has produced staged readings at Tribeca Film Center and the National Black Theater of Harlem. She created and produced of Cinéma Noir Film Series (2014-2015) and is also the founder/producer of The Public Domain Pop-Up Exhibit. She also is the creator and producer of ACTION! The Lowdown on Being a Professional Actor, a talent development panel that took place in February 2017 at Columbus College of Art and Design. Her film, writing and visual art have been exhibited in New York, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Detroit, Cleveland and Columbus.
Peters is an honors graduate of University Michigan with a B.A. in French and Political Science, and she holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. As well, she has done graduate studies in clinical psychology at New York University. She is currently developing her sci-fi feature film Godspeed, along with various other projects.
