Producer Hub Launches THE BRIDGES FELLOWSHIP for African Producers

PRODUCER HUB is launching The Bridges Fellowship and the inaugural cohort of producing fellows. Led by Kenyan Producer Karishma Bhagani, in collaboration with Producer Hub and Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics, this 2-year fellowship program is centered around training African producers, using a uniquely crafted African and Afro-diasporic pedagogy, focused on humanizing producing in cultural infrastructure building. The initial proof of concept consists of 10 Fellows of African descent (from the African continent and the African diaspora) who will engage in a series of creative discussions and workshop sessions to develop their skills and exchange producing practices. Each fellowship will culminate in a 3-week residency with a participating arts or producing organization in the US, UK, or on the African continent. Along with Bhagani as Program Director, the Fellowship will be led by Program Development Lead Nwabisa Plaatjie and Program Manager Rosette Nteyafas.
 
Producer Hub and The Lab come together in collaboration for The Bridges Fellowship with the shared values of humanizing the practice of producing globally. Since 2017, The Lab's Global Fellows Program, supported by the Mellon Foundation, has brought together 40 groundbreaking artists and changemakers from around the globe across four cohorts. Bhagani, a fellow of the Lab’s second cohort, gleaned inspiration from the structure and values of the program, and using it as a model, developed the Bridges Fellowship. At its core, this fellowship seeks to establish the art of producing as a creative and political practice that privileges the process of making and, like The Lab's Global Fellows Program, is rooted in care and community building. Through this program, the inaugural cohort of Bridges Fellows will have the opportunity to be mentored by a global community of like-minded artists, opening up a wider global network of thought partners, collaborators and values-aligned partner organizations, including many alumni of The Lab's Global Fellows Program.
 
“The Bridges Fellowship stemmed from a frustration with seeing repetitive and mundane representations of African stories on world stages, and from a deep desire to have Africans see their own work across the continent. Growing up in Kenya, I knew that there is not a shortage of excellent, world-class artistic work coming out of the African continent that offered a diverse, complex and nuanced depiction of what it means to be African today,” said Karishma Bhagani. “I am incredibly excited at the brilliance of the first cohort of fellows. Each of them has a distinctive producing practice that is born out of their own encounters with artmaking on the African continent, and they boast a range of skills from film and theatre producing, dance, writing and arts management. To me, this group represents the kind of artmaking we need to aspire to: the kind that can speak to different audiences and transcend genres.”
 
The Bridges Fellowship endeavors to empower African producers to own their systems and methods of knowledge production and support their pursuits of validating African-producing practices in the global artistic Playing Field. It has the goal of creating a cross-cultural, regional, and international network of African producers in Africa and the diaspora that can result in long-term South-South collaborations, touring circuits, and partnerships, while also dismantling siloed and genre-biased understandings of producing practices and encouraging generative discourse across the live arts (theatre, music, festivals, literature) and film producing. The Fellowship also works to promote dialogue and cross-cultural exchange between African cultural practitioners, producers, cultural institutions, and stakeholders around the world to foster a sustainable, intergenerational pipeline of creative entrepreneurs on the African continent.
 
The inaugural cohort of Fellows includes Wanjiru ‘Ciru’ Njoroge (Kenya), Tricia Arthur-Stubbs (United Kingdom), Eulalia Ikawinyit Okello (Kenya), Martina Ayoro (Kenya), Chadota Idda (Kenya), José-Arthur Ndong (Benin), Yassmin Abdalazeim (Sudan & Egypt), Diya Vaya (Kenya), Vanessa Iriza (Rwanda), and Cathrine Douglas (Zimbabwe).
 
The participating arts organizations that will partner with the Fellows includes the National Arts Festival (South Africa), Tebere Arts Foundation (Uganda), Jukwaa Arts Productions (Kenya), ArtsEmerson (United States), Bradford Producing Hub (United Kingdom), and more to be announced. For more information, visit www.producerhub.org/bridges.