Kick off #NYAFF33 with a live, interactive event featuring one-on-one conversations with artists from the African diaspora!
The New York African Film Festival opens its 33rd edition with its annual Town Hall on May 1, a dynamic convening that brings together artists, scholars, and cultural workers for an evening of reflection and dialogue. Centered on the theme of “Black Space”—the ongoing transformation of social and physical environments by Black communities toward liberatory futures—the Town Hall foregrounds how such spaces are forged, sustained, and connected to build sovereign futures.
Through a series of performances, reflections, and conversations, the program sets the tone for the festival’s broader theme, As the Stars Sow the Earth, exploring how ancestral memory, spiritual cosmologies, and creative practice shape African and Diasporic worlds. This event brings together practitioners of visual art, land stewardship, literature, and performance art. Each reflects on how Black communities transform conditions of displacement, ecological degradation, and historical rupture into sites of possibility.
In doing so, the Town Hall invites audiences to consider how cultural production sustains our relationships to one another and the earth, offering new ways of inhabiting and shaping the world.
Doors open at 6PM and conversation begins at 6:30PM.
Participants include Lexii Foxx, a multidisciplinary artist and founder of STOP KILLING US (#SKU); Erin Michelle Washington, a creative waymaker and founder of SoulCenter; Kojo Ade, a Harlem-born cultural ambassador and arts professional; and Stephanie Adusei-Boateng, a Ghanaian-British filmmaker and Co-CEO of African Movie Box. The conversation will be moderated by Abosede George, Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies.