Daughter of Eritrean guerilla fighters, born 1981 in Sudan with most of my relatives living in Ethiopia. Raised in USA and Sweden with a BA in Performance Art Production working years at the Peoples Opera House in Stockholm with experience of editing documentaries shown at Cannes, Sarajevo and Gothenburg Film Festival. Now living in NYC studying at the School of Visual Arts working on my MFA thesis researching the online lives of Ethiopian women.
My thesis research, arises from my wish to explore cinematic language in a new way and my burning desire to experience a hybrid of film and cyborgism in the realm of the computer – specifically as it relates to African women and their screen lives. Me, myself, an African woman and an avid computer user, will use the aesthetics of cinema as my toolbox to provide and communicate the shades of human thoughts and emotions. We live in an interesting time where "A hundred years after cinema's birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, are being extended to become the basic ways in which computer users access and interact with all cultural data" - Lev Manovich.
I have found myself extremely curious and wanting to find out more about young peoples’ personal experiences of navigating and living life on the screen, and how these two separate modes of life effect each other. What would a creative documentary about these lives look like? We are living new styles of life that call for new types of documentation and presentation. In style and content. Instead of fans projecting themselves into a favorite movie, they now project themselves onto their computer screens where they create, produce, director, edit and star in their own dramas. They use life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics and identity.
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