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 featuring African video art presentations and a mini-lecture.
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. 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).
Source riversnotablepeople
