Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates that which she has termed “Intimate Ecologies” to explore Blackness, aesthetics and queer, pleasurable, interspecies futures. Ama is a Lecturer at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London), an MFA tutor at the Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam), and a Research Associate at VIAD (University of Johannesburg). Ama’s wider intra-disciplinary work thinks through sustainable ecologies of care and more-than-survival for BIPoC women and queer folk in the arts and academia. Ama’s writing was shortlisted for the 2023 Future Worlds Prize, she has had essays, short fiction and art writing published internationally, and has been exhibited across Europe. Ama is also in the final stages of her PhD at Birkbeck University of London; is a curatorial fellow with Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki) and EVA International (Limerick); a participant of the first Postnatural Independent Programme (Madrid); and was the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with Bard College (New York). Ama’s work has been translated into Twi, French, German and Swedish.

Photo credit Credit Zachary Maxwell Stertz.