Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English Department of the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies, she has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France.

She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name(Polity, 2021) and prefaced by Saidiya Hartman. This book was distinguished by the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020.

She was the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta (2021-2022) ; Mellon Arts Project International Visiting Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University and Visiting Faculty at Bennington College (2022-2023) and served as a member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery (2013-2017).

She translated Saidiya Hartman classic work, Lose Your Mother : A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) from English as À perte de mère – Sur les routes atlantiques de l’esclavage released in September 2023 (Brook).

Lou Mensah is the founder of Shade Media, the space for Black artists and creative practitioners to talk about their work in their own way. Shade’s first venture, the critically acclaimed Shade Podcast launched in 2019 and has run for 12 seasons to date. Shade Art Review, which debuted in September 2023, is a biweekly arts and culture magazine.

Lou also creates audio works for clients including the British Council, Hauser and Wirth, Frieze, Tate, Bloomberg, Iniva, Freelands Foundation, The Runnymede Trust and South London Gallery and has collaborated with artists including Liz Johnson Artur and Ming Smith on installations and recordings.

Lou is a disability and accessibility consultant, an associate lecturer in Communications at Central St. Martins University and a home educator.

Nwando Ebizie is a constellation point for a spectrum of multidisciplinary works that call for RADICAL change.

She challenges her audience to question their perceived realities through art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritualistic dance. Carving out her own particular strand of Afrofuturism, she combines research into the neuroscience of perception (inspired by her own neurodiversity) and an obsession with science fiction with a ritualistic live art practice.

An award-winning artist, her works include her immersive sensory environment Distorted Constellations, her compositions for orchestras including BBC Concert Orchestra, Aurora Orchestra and London Sinfonietta, her pop persona Lady Vendredi (a blaxploitation heroine from another dimension!) and the building of her long-term operatic experience, Hildegard: Visions. He work tours globally including ArtScience Museum Singapore, Tokyo (Bonobo), Rio de Janeiro (Tempo Festival), Berlin (Chalet), Latvia (Baltais Fligelis Concert Hall) and Zurich (Blok) as well as across the UK from Home MCR to the Barbican and Southbank Centre. She is currently a resident artist at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and is creating new works for Estuary Festival.

Nwando works across media, genre and artforms creating mythopoetic metanarratives and alternate realities. Her work is a drawing together of the pieces that she is in a frozen moment of ever-living infinite regress.

Always political and grounded in a mytho-scientific perspective she invites viewers and participants to join her at the Crossroads. At the crossroads where you can choose to pass through the cosmic mirror and touch alternate realities. The realities of what could have been and what should have been and what may possibly be. She works with speculative fictions, possible dreams and lucid worlds.

Balla Fofana has a Masters in political communication from the University of Paris East and from the Center for the Professional Training of Journalists. Since 2014, has been working in French high schools and social centers doing workshops on media education. Former member of the Bondy Blog, a blog focused on reporting from French suburbs (health, education, employment, etc.). Also reported on the economy for the French TV channel TF1. He is now a staff writer for the French daily newspaper Libération. Since 2014, he has been working in French high schools in the Paris region doing workshops on media education. He published  his first novel “La Prophétie de Dali” (Grasset) in May 2023.

Originally from the Senegalese diaspora, Seynabou Sonko is a novelist and musician. In 2023, she published her debut novel, Djinns, with Grasset publishing house, which was awarded the Prix du Cheval Blanc 2023 and the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée 2024.

She is currently a resident at the Villa Médicis in Rome (2024-2025), where she is developing a research project on the pronoun “WE” and writing songs.

tyroneisaacstuart is an interdisciplinary, concept driven artist whose skills originate from Jazz and Hip-Hop Theatre. He was educated by the Tomorrow’s Warriors Jazz organisation & multi-award winning Boy Blue Entertainment. From there tyroneisaacstuart went on to achieve a BA in Jazz Saxophone. With over 12 years of professional working experience as a performer across dance and music, his dance practice has grown to become a mixture of Krump (street dance), contemporary dance, visual art & Jazz music.

He has worked with established artists within the Hip hop sector such as Joseph Toonga, Theo Godson, Botis Seva and toured nationally with Boy Blue Entertainment. Within contemporary dance he has worked with Irene Wernli, Hofesh Shechter Company & multi-award winning artist Nora Chipaumire. Within music he’s worked with many of the artists now shaping the Jazz scene (Moses Boyd, Theon Cross, Cassie Kinoshi, Mark Kavuma & Kokoroko). Commissions include a full length theatre work for the Barbican ‘An Earnest Life’, a duet for Dance Umbrella, Beyond Words & an international Solo work for Hayley Matthews Ensemble. He is a Steve Reid Innovation Award 2019-2020 recipient, and a 2020 Artist in Residence at Clarence Mews Space. He was also in the first Studio Wayne McGregor R6 cohort.

Kayo Chingonyi FRSL was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry and of The Civitella Ranieri Foundation. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize by The Poetry Society and was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award.

Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester before joining Durham University as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He is a writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast Decode on Spotify, poetry editor at Bloomsbury, and his most recent collection A Blood Condition was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.