A panel discussion moderated by MFON co-founders, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Adama Delphine Fawundu, will feature contributing photographers sharing perspectives on photography and spirituality.
A panel discussion moderated by MFON co-founders, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Adama Delphine Fawundu, will feature contributing photographers sharing perspectives on photography and spirituality.
Presenters: Régine Romain Diane Wah Imani Dennison
Moderators: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn Adama Delphine Fawundu
Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Water Street
Presented by:
A panel discussion moderated by MFON co-founders, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Adama Delphine Fawundu, will feature contributing photographers sharing perspectives on photography and spirituality.
Régine Romain is a dynamic storyteller who uses photographs/film/performance to create acts of social resistance stoking the collective imagination, to keep alive new ways of seeing. For the past two years, she lived in Benin, West Africa, conducting research, teaching, completing her “Brooklyn to Benin: A Vodou Pilgrimage” mixed-media project and directing/producing three short films. While in West Africa, she created the WaWaWa Diaspora Centre, toactively heal historic wounds and trauma related to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade through inter-generational arts, education, and exchange programs. In August 2018, Régine launched her new podcast entitled “Vodou Roots: A Love Story Musical via BRIC Brooklyn Free Speech Radio.
Diane Wah is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist working primarily in photography and installation. Her practice focuses primarily on the narrative simulcra of portraiture, and digital iconography in popular culture.
A recipient of a 2009 Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation residency, Wah received her M.F.A from Columbia University and her B.A. from The New School University. She’s being exhibiting her work nationally for the past 10 years. She is currently Creative Director and Co-Founder of the Brooklyn Temple of Epistemological Practice.
Imani Dennison was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Imani’s work explores ideas around Blackness, Intimacy, Afro-futurism, Sexuality and Identity. Imani graduated in 2014 from Howard University with a B.A in Political Science and concentrations in International relations, and a minor in Photography. Imani then went on to study at Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa where she furthered her studies in Analogue Photography. Inspired by big city urban life Imani’s interest in analogue photography grew in to a love for moving image. After moving to New York City Imani shot and co-directed her very first motion picture, a short drama titled “Garden of Eden,” which was selected by the Creative Minds in Cannes to screen at the Short Film Corner at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Imani currently works as a freelance Photographer/Cinematographer in Brooklyn New York.
Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a documentary photographer and writer. She is the co-author of the independently published MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, the first anthology in nearly 30 years that highlights photography produced by women of African descent. Barrayn is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Her work has been included in books like Black: A Celebration of a Culture edited by Dr. Deborah Willis, Photography, A Feminist History by Emma Lewis, and Streams of Consciousness: Bamako Encounters — African Biennale of Photography edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.
Barrayn’s personal and professional projects have taken her from Minneapolis to Malaysia to Martinique to Mauritania, among many global locales where she focuses her inquiries on Black diasporic communities with a special interest in religious traditions, aesthetics and the experiences of women. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco and the Taubman Museum of Art (VA). In 2018, she was included as one of the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) Hundred Heroines. Barrayn earned an M.A. from New York University. She is currently working on a book on contemporary Black photographers.
Photo Credit: Alex Bershaw
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts.
Ms. Fawundu has been documenting global hip-hop and urban youth culture for over twenty years. Her art re-imagines and glorifies the strength of African and Black diaspora culture and identities that continue to evolve, despite the social violence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonialism.
Ms. Fawundu is a co-founder and author of the book and movement, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is currently an artist-in-resident at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. Her awards include the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Grant, and the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant.
Ms. Fawundu’s works can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Norton Museum of Art, Corridor Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, University of Maryland.
MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora is an independently published anthology edited by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Adama Delphine Fawundu. MFON features photographic works created by 118 African and Diasporic women artists representing 27 nations. It will soon be relaunched as an online platform. Our goal is to promote an international representative voice of women photographers from continental Africa and its diaspora.
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