Zina Saro-Wiwa

Zina Saro-Wiwa (born 1976, Port Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Brooklyn-based video artist and filmmaker.

She makes video installations, documentaries, music videos and experimental films.

Saro-Wiwa is the founding filmmaker of the alt-Nollywood movement.

A movement that uses the narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of the Nollywood film industry but for subversive, politically challenging ends.

Formerly a BBC journalist, her artistic practice emerged from her interest in changing the way the world sees Africa using film, art, and food.

Her practice includes New West African Kitchen, a project where Saro-Wiwa re-imagines West African cuisine.

Each feast also features African video art presentations and a mini lecture.

He was executed in 1995 by the military regime in Nigeria when she was 19.

She grew up in Surrey and Sussex in the UK where Saro-Wiwa's wife Maria and five children lived.

She attended the private girls' school, Roedean, in Sussex, and the University of Bristol where she studied economic and social history.

Her twin sister is the travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa, author of Looking For Transwonderland (published by Granta).

Her older brother Ken Wiwa, is the author of the memoir In The Shadow of a Saint (published by Random House/Vintage).

Saro-Wiwa was a BBC reporter, researcher, presenter and producer.

She worked freelance all over the network on BBC Radio 4, Radio 3, World Service Radio and BBC2.

At the age of 20, she began contributing reports to BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind and In Living Colour programmes.

She went on to work on a variety of BBC Radio 4 programmes including You & Yours, Woman's Hour, Home Truths, The Long View and also World Service arts programme, The Ticket.

She has presented four Radio series: A Samba For Saro-Wiwa, a two-part Radio 4 series in which she recounted her experiences in Bahia, Brazil; Water Works, a five-part series looking at water provision in the third world; Faith & Fashion, a two-part series on the intersection between high fashion and religion for the World Service, and Hello World, also for The World Service, where she explored Brazilian, Indian, Nigerian and British culture through the filter of their celebrity magazines.

Saro-Wiwa began her career as a filmmaker with 2002's Bossa: The New Wave, a documentary short about contemporary Bossa Nova music, which she directed and produced.

From 2004 to 2008, Saro-Wiwa was one of the presenters for BBC Two's flagship arts magazine programme, The Culture Show.

She went on to direct and produce Hello Nigeria! (2004), a 23-minute documentary which examines Nigerian society through the Nigerian celebrity and high society magazine, Ovation.

Hello Nigeria! was screened at the New York African Film Festival in 2004.

The film was covered by The Telegraph newspaper and was featured on the BBC's Talking Movies programme.

In August 2008 she co-presented three BBC programmes (The Edinburgh Show) which covered the Edinburgh festival, alongside historian and BBC Broadcaster Matthew Sweet.

In 2008, Saro-Wiwa interviewed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe at his home.

On 5 June 2008 BBC Radio 4 aired the resulting half-hour programme about Achebe and his seminal tome Things Fall Apart on the 50th anniversary of the book's publication.

In 2008, after leaving the BBC's Culture Show she began to focus on film-making and directed This Is My Africa (2008/9), which explores African culture through the anecdotes and commentary of London-based Africans and Africaphiles.

Interviewees include artist Yinka Shonibare, actor Colin Firth, filmmaker John Akomfrah, Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow, and actor Chiwetel Ejiofor.

The film was screened at numerous galleries, museums and film festivals worldwide, including the New York African Film Festival, the Cambridge African Film Festival, Real Life Film Festival Accra, Stevenson Gallery and The Brooklyn Museum.

It won the best documentary short at the International Black Docufest 2008.

This Is My Africa was licensed by HBO, showing on the channel from February 2010 to February 2012.

In 2010 Saro-Wiwa went to Lagos Nigeria to make two films (Phyllis and The Deliverance of Comfort) in response to her fascination with the Nollywood film industry.

The principles of the alt-Nollywood genre (low-budget films that purposely exploit Nollywood's visual conventions for subversive narrative value) were expressed in these two short films that were originally created for the exhibition Sharon Stone in Abuja:

Phyllis is an atmospheric portrait of a 'psychic' vampire, a woman obsessed with synthetic Nollywood dramas, that lives alone in Lagos, Nigeria.

The central Nollywood-inspired device in this short experimental film is the practice and significance of wig-wearing in Nollywood film; a practice Saro-Wiwa invested with deeper psychological as well as science-fiction layers.

Underpinning this central idea however is a critique of the unforgiving treatment of single women in Nollywood and Nigeria.

The Deliverance of Comfort is a short satirical fable about a 'child witch' called Comfort.

On 22 March 2011, Saro-Wiwa was named as one of the top 25 leaders of the African Renaissance in The Times newspaper.

In 2017, an article published on Norient highlighted that Saro-Wiwa's use of dubbing alt-Nollywood movies "subverts narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of the Nigerian cinema".

Zina Saro-Wiwa was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, to Ken and Maria Saro-Wiwa.

Her late father, the author and poet Ken Saro-Wiwa, became a well-known Nigerian environmental and human rights activist.