Our guest  is filmmaker NIKYATU JUSU.  The Sierra Leonean-American filmmaker's short films have played at festivals nationally and internationally garnering her NYU’s prestigious Spike Lee Fellowship Award, the Princess Grace Foundation Narrative film grant and Director’s Guild of America Honorable Mentions.  Her feature screenplay Free The Town was one of 12 projects invited to participate in Sundance Institute’s first Diverse Writers Workshop. Additionally Free The Town was hand selected for Africa’s most prestigious Film Market, the 2013 Durban Film Mart and one of five narrative films selected for Film Independent's Fast Track.  Presently Nikyatu is in development on her feature film FLOWERS.  The short film rendition of Flowers, which she co-wrote/co-directed with Yvonne Shirley, won the HBO Short Film Competition at the American Black Film Festival (2016) and is currently touring the festival circuit.  Nikyatu studied narrative filmmaking at New York University’s MFA film program and teaches filmmaking full time. She is a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. This edition is co-presented and produced by Weeksville Heritage Center.

Weeksville Heritage Center is Brooklyn’s largest African-American cultural institution, is a multidisciplinary museum dedicated to preserving the history of the 19th century African American community of Weeksville, Brooklyn - one of America’s first free black communities. A not-for-profit organization, their programming is sponsored, in part, by the new York City Deptartment of Cultural Affairs.