I’m a filmmaker and visual artist creating spellbinding futurist stories about intriguing, authentic characters. I am fascinated by human motivation and behavior. I studied psychology and was once a social worker, both of which just inflamed my interest in the human psyche. As a child, I was always fascinated with science and before too long, science fiction as well. This fascination continues to this day but at this point, I am equally conscious of creating stories that represent the world as I know it to be --- multiracial, multicultural and multi-experienced. Creating characters who look like me is a core element of my practice, partially in tribute to my young self, who did not see herself on the screen in cinematic sci-fi but loved the genre nonetheless. Equally important, I want to represent truth and I want to provide that representation in characters who embody groups who are often marginalized off the screen.

 

Afrofuturism is more than a genre for me. It is a worldview. It excites me, captivates me and inspires me. What does it mean? Afrofuturism is an understanding of the world as a place where myself and those who look like me have direct access to unlimited possibilities. Science and technology inevitably lead us to new futures. As a lover of science fiction, I am aware that the genre often works in tandem with science reality, because imagination, as much as necessity, is most often the mother of invention. And in as much as we experience time, the future is unwritten. It is a place of freedom. As a Black woman storyteller, the future affords me to create characters, stories, existences that are not bound by the weight of the past. I do not hide from history and its untold wisdom, though; I choose to tell stories of new futures.

 

I claim the freedom to tell speculative stories of science, technology, extraterrestrial life, space-time and beyond. There are questions of existence, the nature of reality and the future of the human species that I suppose may never be entirely answered. For the time being, I’m going to keep creating stories that explore.