Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah
Born in Ghana, Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah is following in the footsteps of his ancestors, Djibril Diop Mambèty and Fela Kuti. The cinema is his weapon of choice. His is a trajectory marked with a poetics of refusals. His lens is a river running through a thousand villages, reflecting the hope and aspirations of the African people. With a BFA in Television Production from the National Film and Television Institute in Accra, and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago Cinema Art + Science, he now considers himself an apostate of the academy and commercial cinema. This is a position that stems from his renewed faith in Third Cinema and a commitment to making work and championing film pedagogy that directly impacts social change. Ofosu-Yeboah’s work spans four continents. He has taught television at the National Film and Television Institute in Accra and participated in a residency at China Radio and TV Association, Beijing, and Serbia’s Documentary Master Class (InterDoc). In 2014, he received a fellowship from The Gamechangers Project, a US-based national fellowship program for emerging filmmakers of color. He is also a recipient of the Albert P. Weisman Award, Chicago, and The City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) Individual Artists Program (IAP) Grant Award, among others. Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah has developed media content for the National Black Programming Consortium’s (NBPC) Black Public Media. The filmmaker has presented work at the annual convening of the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) at American University in Washington, D.C. and Montana State University in Bozeman. Aside from completing post-production in Chicago on his newest short, Akata, Ofosu-Yeboah continues with development on his debut feature, Mangoes and Coffins, set in the land of his birth, Ghana. In 2016, he will present new work at the prestigious Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV) in Bauta, Cuba.
