Chrystel Oloukoï is a a researcher, moving image artist, as well as freelance film critic and curator currently based in Richmond VA, previously in Lagos, Boston, New Orleans, Johannesburg and Paris.
They hold a BA and MA in Geography from the University Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne. Currently, they are completing a PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, with concentrations in Social Anthropology, Critical Media Practice and Women Gender and Sexuality, and are a predoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia (UVA). Their dissertation “Night/life: Maroon Ecologies of the Night in Lagos” and the series of experimental short films entitled “black nocturnal” explore imaginations of the night in Lagos and the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline. In the Fall 2024, they will join the Geography department at the University of Washington in Seattle as a tenure-track assistant professor of urban geography and black political economy.
They have curated a number of programs on experimental cinema, queer cinema and Black continental and diasporic cinema, including the forthcoming “Black Women Experimental Filmmakers” in collaboration with Culture Arts Society, “Playing in the Dark: Watery Experiments” for Canyon Cinema, “Anti-Ethnography”, “Carceral Frames, Fugitive Dreams” and “Queer Celluloid” for the Lagos-based microcinema Monangambee. In partnership with the artist collective hFACTOR and Monangambee, they have organized the inaugural edition of the Lagos Pride Film Festival in June 2022.
Their writing on cinema has appeared in a number of publications, including Metrograph, Sight & Sound, BFI, World Records and Film Comment.
For commissions or any other inquiries, please reach them by email.
