Afi Venessa Appiah

Bio

I am a 29-year-old, ever-learning theorist who can remember being a 12-year-old writer and who expects to someday be an 84-year-old writer. I’m also comfortably reclusive – a hermit butterfly in the middle of New York – a latent sojourner, a reluctant cynic when I’m not careful, a questioning feminist, a Black African; an oil-and-water combination of zeal, lull, insecurity, certainty, and intensity.

Afi Venessa Appiah is a theorist, editor, and publisher specializing in African Studies, Film Studies, and Visual Culture. Currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch, she holds a Master of Arts in Film Studies with a specialization in African Studies, as well as a double Bachelor of Arts in both disciplines. Afi's contemplative approach finds objective significance in the realms of the intangible, complex, and taboo.

Her thesis, "Within Double Restraint: the Aesthetics & Dialectics of Eroticism in Sub-Saharan Cinema", has been archived within the Library & Archives of Canada. Combining her academic research with experience in independent publishing and curation, she developed "Emblematic Elusions: Eros in African Cinema", an educational chapbook series that utilizes the alluring potential of art book design to present film essays encouraging social, economic, and political discourse. This series is now available in bookstores and institutions across Africa, North America and Europe.

Afi is also the editor at Anteism Books, where she has participated in the publishing process for artists' books by notable figures such as Solange Knowles, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Refik Anadol, Matthew Hansel, Sougwen Chung and many more. 
Afi has also moderated and spoken on panels at Le Grand Palais (Paris), Printed Matter Inc. (New York), Hauser & Wirth (Los Angeles), Ujima Publications Workshop (Boston), and Nigra Iuventa Symposium (Montréal). Her written work appears in Chutney Magazine, Contemporary &, Montclair University Galleries, and the Book Arts Solidarity Network.

Afi's research advocates for the conceptual and analytical application of eroticism as an essential yet overlooked lens in African cinematic studies. Her dissertation will examine representations of sexuality, the erotic, and the (semi-)nude Black form in African and diasporic cinema, demonstrating how filmmakers redefine the Black female body in the visual field—from the wounded signifier to an embodied vessel for liberation. Through the universal question of Eros, she approaches cinema as an intuitive site of inquiry intersecting with broader discourses in historiography, visual culture, philosophy, (post)colonialism, migration and diaspora, socio-economic dynamics, and (post)nationalism.