THE FIRST ITERATION: BLACK PHANTASMAGORIA

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KINETIC DISCOURSES

Adjoa Andoh is one of Britain’s leading actors on stage and screen, and won global acclaim as Lady Danbury in the Netflix smash Bridgerton – a role that saw her nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress at the 2021 and the 2022 NAACP Image Awards. A BBC radio actor for over 30 years, she is also an award-winning narrator of over 150 audiobooks. She co-funds the Future Worlds Prize for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Colour.

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GENRE MARAUDERS

THE OTHER IN FANTASY

Corey Brotherson is an award-winning Freelance Writer, Editor and Creative Consultant who has built a 22-year career in the videogames industry writing for over a dozen companies, including PlayStation, King and Apple. He is the Narrative Designer/Writer for the in-development adventure game Windrush Tales, worked as Lead Narrative Designer for Surgent Studios, and became a full member of BAFTA in 2022 after two consecutive years as a BAFTA Game Awards judge.

His 17-year comic book career includes co-creating the critically acclaimed urban fantasy series Magic of Myths, and writing/editing Yomi Ayeni’s award-winning steampunk transmedia series, Clockwork Watch.

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NEPTUNE FROST

Liz Chege trained as an architect and town planner. In 2022, she was invited to be a Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow, Acumen Fellow and BAFTA member. She is a Berlinale Talent alumni and founding member of Come the Revolution, a collective of creatives committed to exploring Black life and cultural expression through cinema. She was programme producer of British Council’s “No Direct Flight” at the British Film Institute, a cross-media exploration of global African diaspora moving-image makers. She has served on international film festival juries and continues to work as a curator and critic. Most recently, she was appointed director of Africa in Motion Film Festival (Scotland).

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DREXCIYAN REALMS.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythmanalyst, and writer. Brown's debut book Assembling a Black Counter Culture was released on Primary Information in 2022. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression. He has released three albums on Planet Mu; 'Of Desire, Longing' (2019), 'Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry' (2020) and 'Techxodus' (2023).

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AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY

Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou is a writer, the founding editor-in-chief and general arts editor of Lucy Writers, and is currently completing her PhD in English Literature and Visual Material Culture at UCL. She holds a BA in English Literature from Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies from King’s College London and a Diploma in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Arts. She regularly writes on visual art, dance, film and literature for magazines such as The London Magazine, The White Review, The Arts Desk, Burlington Contemporary, Worms Magazine, Art Monthly and many others. From 2022-2023, Hannah managed an Arts Council England-funded project for emerging women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds, titled What the Water Gave Us, in collaboration with The Ruppin Agency and Writers’ Studio, which resulted in an anthology of the same name. She is also working on a hybrid work of creative non-fiction about women artists and drawing, an extract from which is published in Prototype’s 2023 anthology, Prototype 5. Read her work. Follow her on Twitter @hhgsparkles and Instagram @hannahhg25.

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IMAGINARY CITIES

NK Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer whose fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her Broken Earth Trilogy was the first to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. She won a fourth Hugo, for Best Novelette, in 2020 for Emergency Skin, and a fifth in 2022 for Best Graphic Story for her work on DC's "Far Sector." Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Grant in 2020. 

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NEPTUNE FROST

David Kwaw Mensah is an award winning portrait photographer as well as a lover and writer of all things movie related for Black Film and Media, The Looking Glass Collective, Live Magazine and Soul Culture. His work continues to document black lives in London and in doing so he hopes to form ‘a love letter to future generations written with light and shadow to be explored, celebrated and revered’. In short he hopes people in the future ‘will feel compelled to pour libations for us when they see what beauty we achieved’. His work has been exhibited in Paris and London and has appeared in The Stage as well as in Redbull’s Amphiko series as well as in Black Joy Zine. He recently won the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain Prize and continues to photograph The Notting Hill Carnival every year as he has done for more than a decade. 

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IMAGINARY CITIES

Victor LaValle is an American author. He has published two graphic novels and eight works of fiction including the short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus the novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Lone Women and the fantasy-horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker Awards, a Shirley Jackson Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Key to Southeast Queens. His novel, The Changeling, is now streaming on Apple TV+, he serves as Executive Producer and plays the Narrator in the series (voice only). He teaches writing at Columbia University. 

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GENRE MARAUDERS

Born in the UK to Ugandan parents, Leah Muwanga-Magoye is a storyteller born in England to Ugandan parents. Her nomadic upbringing in Kenya, Namibia and the UK influenced her interest in the power of mythical narratives to reclaim forfeited spaces, remember forgotten truths and repair fragmented identities. As a platform agnostic writer she has worked across theatre, film, television, animation and interactive fiction. She completed a MA (Hons) in Classics at the University of Edinburgh where she was awarded the Hardie Prize for her dissertation ‘The Mythic and Tragic Visions of Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy’. She subsequently attended Central Saint Martins completing an MA in Dramatic Writing. As well as writing and directing film, theatre and animation, she has taught as an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, and worked as Narrative Designer for interactive scripted projects in development at Netflix. Her most recent work exhibited at Chiswick House, a site-responsive sound installation consisting of a collection of mythical tales, was entitled ‘we shed as we pick up – Tales of the Named and the Nameless, 2023'’ In 2019 she was awarded Arts Council funding to develop a theatrical work and selected to be in the 2022 cohort of Games London's Ensemble showcase exhibited across the UK, including Trafalgar Square. She has also been profiled for the Screen Industries Growth Network and spoken on panels for the Writer's Guild, Radio 1 and Film London.

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AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY

Terence Nance is an Artist, Musician, and Filmmaker born in Dallas, Texas in what was then referred to as the State-Thomas community. Nance wrote, directed, scored, and starred in his first feature film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically in 2013, was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2014, and debuted his Peabody award-winning television series Random Acts of Flyness on HBO in the summer of 2018. In the fall of 2018, it was announced that Nance was tapped to write, produce and direct Space Jam: A New Legacy, starring Lebron James, and in 2020 Terence released his first EP, THINGS I NEVER HAD under the name Terence Etc. In 2020 he also partnered with filmmakers Jenn Nkiru, Bradford Young, Nanette Nelms and Mishka Brown to form The Ummah Chroma Creative Partners – a directors collective and production company. This team released KILLING IN THY NAME in collaboration with Rage Against The Machine in January of 2021 In 2022,Terence released both Random Acts of Flyness Program II as well as his debut album, VORTEX. In 2023, Terence's first solo exhibition, “Swarm,” opened at the ICA Philadelphia.

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MAMI WATA

C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi represents a new wave of Nigerian filmmakers. His latest film MAMI WATA is vividly shot in black-and-white and accompanied by an incredible oceanic soundscape and hypnotic score to frame its fantasy-fable. It won the Sundance Film Festival: World Cinema Cinematography Award (Dramatic) and the African Critics Award, Cinematography Award, and Set Design Award at FESPACO in 2023. Obasi‘s Ojuju (2014) and O-Town (2015) screened at many festivals, including Gothenburg and Fantasia. Hello, Rain (2018) premiered at Oberhausen and over 40 festivals, winning a Jury Prize at Fantasia, and the BFI Short Film Award nomination. Juju Stories (2021), an anthology film directed by the Surreal16 Collective, won the Boccalino D’oro Award for Best Film at Locarno. 

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MAMI WATA

HIDDEN FIGURES

MAGINARY CITIES

BttF Founder and Director Irenosen Okojie MBE is an award-winning author who has curated for the Southbank Centre, the BBC, Duckie and programmed the Maverick Women and The Moon strand at Moon Festival featuring Margaret Atwood. She co-presented Turn up for the Books podcast on BBC Sounds with Simon Savidge and Bastille front man, Dan Smith, and judged the 2023 Women’s Prize. Appointed to the Royal Society of Literature as a Fellow in 2018, her short stories have been published in the US, Africa and the UK. Her debut novel, Butterfly Fish, was published in 2015, for which she was a recipient of a 2016 Betty Trask Award. Her short story collection, Speak Gigantular, was published in 2016. It was shortlisted for the 2016 inaugural Jhalak Prize and the 2017 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. A collection of short st
ories, Nudibranch, was published in 2019. It was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2020. The story ‘Grace Jones’ won the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. In 2021 she was awarded an MBE For Services To Literature. In 2023 she was named a visionary artist in Red Magazine’s The Next 25 Visionaries to Watch. A novel, Curandera, is forthcoming in 2024.

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DREXCIYAN REALMS.

Abdul Qadim Haqq is an American visual artist who is considered Detroit's number one ambassador of art for world-renowned techno music artists. Haqq collaborated with Drexciya on several projects, notably Neptune’s Lair (1999), and his artwork is featured on classic Detroit Techno records from Juan Atkins, Transmat, Planet E and Underground Resistance. In 2020 - 21 he created and published graphic novels The Book Of Drexciya Vol 1 and Vol 2 with contributions by Dai Satō and artists Leo Rodrigues, Alan Oldham, Hector Rubilar, Leonardo Gondim, Daniel Oliviera and Milton Estevam.

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GENRE MARAUDERS

Chella Ramanan is a narrative designer on the writing team for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, at Ubisoft Massive in Sweden. She is half of 3-Fold Games, a female game development team from the UK, whose games include the BAFTA-nominated Before I Forget and the upcoming Windrush Tales, a narrative adventure featuring the triumphs and tribulations of two Caribbean immigrants in post-war Britain.

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DREXCIYAN REALMS.

Josey Rebelle has been described as “the genre-bending DJ dominating top-tier dancefloors worldwide” (Mixmag). Having made her name at legendary London basement club Plastic People and on Rinse FM, she now plays mesmerising sets at the world’s most iconic clubs and festivals. Her accolades and awards including DJ Mag’s 100 of the World’s Best DJs 2022 list, BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix of the Year 2019, DJ Mag Best of British Award for Best Compilation 2020 for Josey In Space, Resident Advisor Mix of the Year 2020 and a coveted DJ Mag cover.

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THE COLOR PURPLE

Josh Rivers is a curator of conversations, a social justice communications professional and public speaker. He is the creator and host of Busy Being Black, the award-winning podcast exploring queer Black cultures, identities and experiences, which is a regular feature on the homepages of Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. Busy Being Black has been awarded funding from the European Cultural Foundation and Wellcome Trust, and live recordings have taken place at Spotify, British Film Institute, London Podcast Festival, Soho House, NYC Pride, UK Black Pride and Black Tech Fest. He volunteers as the Head of Cultural Partnerships at UK Black Pride, the world's largest free Black Pride celebration. He was named one of the UK's most influential communications professionals in PRWeek's Power Book 2022 and 2023, and was nominated in the Top 10 for Outstanding Contribution to LGBTQ Life at the 2023 British LGBT Awards.

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KINETIC DISCOURSES

Calah Singleton is a writer and editor, originally from the United States but now based in London. A graduate of Yale and the LSE, she works as an editor at Hachette/Hodder & Stoughton's science fiction and fantasy imprint, Hodderscape. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Future Worlds Prize for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Colour and is represented by Stevie Finegan at Zeno Agency. She's on Twitter/X @calah.

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GENRE MARAUDERS

Rivers Solomon writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honor List and winning a Firecracker Award, Solomon's debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts was a finalist for a Lambda, a Hurston/Wright, and a Locus award. Solomon's second book, The Deep, was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award and shortlisted for many others including the British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards, and Sorrowland, Solomon's most recent novel, was awarded an Otherwise Award. Their short work appears in Black Warrior Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Guernica, Best American Short Stories, Tor.com, Best American Horror and Dark Fantasy, and elsewhere.

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THE OTHER IN FANTASY

Symoné is a Guinness World Record-holding interdisciplinary performer, working between alternative circus skills, drag performance, theatre making, and visionary videogame design. Her journey includes memorable experiences such as rollerskating alongside Nile Rodgers, sharing the stage with Peaches during the 10th Anniversary 'Teaches of Peaches' tour, and and she has created noteworthy theatre productions such as "UTOPIAN (t&cs apply), a live art circus show questioning abuse of power roles and "Euphorica", a queer dance and circus ensemble about queerness within nature.. Symoné is currently engaged in the development of a mixed-reality installation piece, "A Dream Within A Dream," in collaboration with Sammy Metcalfe. The experience proposes questions surrounding gender identity, memory loss, dreaming, and the essence of humanity in a glitchy dream-like setting that is part immersive theatre, part videogame installation. Follow her on Instagram @symoneforever.

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GENRE MARAUDERS

Tade Thompson writes in multiple genres including science fiction, crime, horror, and general fiction. In 2019 he won the Arthur C Clarke award, the UK’s most prestigious prize for science fiction novels, for Rosewater, part of a trilogy that was a finalist for the Hugo award for best series. In addition to novels, he also writes screenplays and short stories. He works as a hospital psychiatrist.

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HIDDEN FIGURES

BttF Creative Director Sara Veal has worked with spaces and festivals including The Book Club, Trapeze, Larmer Tree, Port Eliot, Shambala, ALSO and Primadonna, and looks after happiness and connection at Uplift Games, the studio behind the most-played experience on Roblox, Adopt Me. Sara created an edible book launch catered by London Afro Vegan for Irenosen’s Nudibranch.

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THE OTHER IN FANTASY

Amon Warmann has been a film and TV critic in the UK since 2011, and became a Contributing Editor and monthly columnist at Empire Magazine in 2020. He is talkSPORT Radio's weekly film reviewer, and has written for Variety, British GQ, The Daily Mirror, and Heat Magazine. He has numerous television appearances to his name including Sky Cinema, BBC News, and Channel 4, and he is the co-host of the Fade To Black podcast.