International Slavery Remembrance Day

Dr June Givanni is a BAFTA Award-winning international film curator whose pioneering experience and expertise in global African, Caribbean and Afrodiasporic cinemas for over 30 years is widely recognised. The development of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) is based on her decades-long collection. The ambition of the JGPACA is to disseminate this invaluable heritage collection as widely as possible. 

Givanni’s work as a programmer began in the early 1980s when organising Third Eye, London’s first Festival of Third World Cinema. Givanni worked as a film programmer at the Greater London Council’s Ethnic Minorities Unit developing and elaborating Black British Independent cinema, and co-organised Third Cinema: Theories and Practices at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1986.

In the 1990s, Givanni ran the African Caribbean Film Unit at the British Film Unit, edited the quarterly magazine Black Film Bulletin and organised the conference Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas at the British Film Institute. In 2000, she edited the publication Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image and programmed Planet Africa at the Toronto International Film Festival. Givanni has worked as a film curator with festivals on five continents and has been involved in the development of an infrastructural ecology for Pan-African cinema within, between and across these continents. 

Sharon Walters is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across collage, photography, paper cut-outs, and film. Her practice explores Blackness, with a particular focus on the representation of Black women. Central to her work is the ongoing project Seeing Ourselves, through which she creates layered narratives that challenge histories of erasure and celebrate Black identity. Her signature paper cut-outs are often floated in glass, allowing the shadows they cast to evoke memory and absence.

Walters has presented multiple solo exhibitions and exhibited at world-renowned institutions including Gagosian, the Walker Art Gallery, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. She received the Reach Art Prize in 2019 and the Mosaic Art Award at Hauser & Wirth in 2023 for Seeing Ourselves.

In 2024, Walters was awarded the Caird Research Fellowship at Royal Museums Greenwich, culminating in a display and public programme running from February 2026 to February 2027. Her work is held in collections including the National Portrait Gallery, Soho House, and House of Koko. 

Ethno Vox, a husband-and-wife duo, offers unique singing opportunities to communities with limited access to musical expression in a professional setting.

Both in vocal performance and musical direction, their theatre expertise is current and extensive. Celia won a nomination for Best Musical Director at the Black Theatre Awards 2025 for her role in Jamaica Love. Colin received national acclaim, including being the inaugural winner of BBC Songs of Praise Gospel Choir of the Year and leading the first choir to reach the finals of Britain’s Got Talent in 2018. They have several awards for their work across genres and communities.

Keen exponents of music in the African oral tradition, Ethno Vox is delighted to continue its long-standing relationship with the National Maritime Museum, delivering inspirational harmonies in performance and exploring songs of deliverance, assurance, hope, and restoration in their workshops as part of this year’s programme.

Imruh Bakari is a filmmaker and writer, born in Basseterre, St. Kitts and Nevis; a founder-member of Ceddo Film, Video Workshop and a director of Kuumba Productions in 1980s London. From 1999–2004 he was Festival Director of Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), and a member of the Advisory Council of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), 2012-15.

His published work includes African Experiences of Cinema (co-ed. Mbye Cham, BFI, 1996); journal articles, book chapters, and poetry collections including Without Passport or Apology (Smokestack Book 2017) and The Madman in this House (Smokestack Books 2021).

Bakari’s film and television credits include African Tales - Short Film Series (2005/2008), Blue Notes and Exiled Voices (1991), and The Mark of the Hand – Aubrey Williams (1986). Bakari is formerly a member of the Film Studies academic staff and Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Education and the Arts at the University of Winchester. He is currently a director of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA). 

Damilola Lemomu is an archivist and film curator whose work engages with Pan-African film culture and explores the archive as a living infrastructure. She is Archivist and Project Curator at the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA), co-organiser and programmer of Otherfield Film Festival, and Programme Adviser for Sheffield Documentary Festival. She has taught non-fiction filmmaking in alternative educational settings and serves on the Advisory Board of the Rio Cinema Archive Working Group, contributing to the preservation and activation of a significant community cinema archive in London.

Esme Allman is a poet, writer, and creative facilitator from London. Her work explores history, desire and anticolonial human relationships with ecological landscapes, predominantly using the ekphrasis poetic form. Her debut poetry collection, Sweet Bone Girl, was published by Broken Sleep Books in March 2025.

She has received commissions from the Barbican Centre to write poetic responses to Carrie Mae Weems’ Reflections for Now exhibition (2023) and Noah Davis’ Retrospective exhibition (2025), a commission led by renowned writer Claudia Rankine. Both responses were performed in the Barbican Gallery alongside the visual works. 

Esme received a commission from Pace Gallery to write the accompanying digital catalogue to Giddeon Appah’s The Play of Thought using poetry. She has also received poetry and writing commissions from NHS Arts and Heritage, the Institute of Contemporary Art with BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 6, English Heritage and Poetry Vs Colonialism.

Jahnavi Inniss is an award-winning quiltmaker and workshop facilitator whose practice is focused on documenting untold stories within Black British history. Through her adaptation of the culturally rich medium of quilting, she documents history through a critical lens, challenging distorted historical narratives and creating representation and empowerment for Black Brits. 

As a workshop facilitator, she has facilitated artistic workshops for a number of organisations including the Crafts Council, Tate Britain, the South London Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Her workshops engage participants with stories of joy and empowerment to celebrate, reframe and document our collective and personal histories.