current projects

Upcoming Panels/Performances

The political contexts and consequences of animation have changed so that digital animation is now deployed in human rights tribunals, global activism campaigns and speculative future visions. The Animate Assembly research network will explore the implications of these new deployments of animation from three angles: Anime, Animism, Anima. Animate Assembly 12 welcomes contributions from Ama Josephine Budge, Kohei Saito and Rebecca Carson.

5 November, 10.30am, Birkbeck University of London (free)

National Women's Studies Association 2019 Conference

The National Women's Studies Association leads the field of women’s studies in educational and social transformation. Established in 1977, NWSA has more than 2,500 members worldwide. Our annual conference regularly draws more than 2,200 attendees and is the only annual meeting in the US exclusively dedicated to showcasing the latest feminist scholarship. Ama Josephine Budge presents her research: Intimate Ecologies/Tentacular Tendencies as part of the panel: Machines and Monsters.

14 November, 2.35pm, Hilton Union Square, San Francisco (ticketed)

Speculative Fabulations/Beneath Yaba's Garden: Ama Josephine Budge with Junauda Petrus

Join us for lunch and a discussion by UK based, Black speculative writer, curator and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge on the speculative fabulation on queer archives and Intimate Ecologies in Ghana. Junuada Petrus, Dakota land born filmmaker, queer artmaker, and author of The Stars and the Blackness Between Them will give a full creative response.

19 November, 12pm, Soul Bowl, Minneapolis (free)

Previous Projects:

Apocalypse Reading Room launches at Free Word, 2019

The Apocalypse Reading Room will be an on-site library from writer and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge, who will also lead in-conversation events exploring alternatively gendered and ungendered worlds. Part of Free Words new Season: All the Ways that we could Grow.

Co-convening 'The Art of Not Doing Conference: on Rest, Resistance & Pleasure Activism'

In a culture that valorises busyness, productivity, pace and “progress”, stillness can be radical. Refusing, ignoring, omitting, not doing; sometimes the most political actions look like doing nothing at all. But who gets to not do? When and how is not doing a politicised, racialised, privileged, resistant or utopian act?

Birkbeck University, Oct 17th 2019.

Casco Art Institute Commission

I'm delighted to announce that I have been commissioned as one of four solo artists, to produce a new work for the Casco Art Institute Fall Exhibition Programme, in conjunction with Uitfeest in Utrecht, Netherlands from 14 Sept - 3 Nov, 2019. Other works will be presented by Babi Badalov, Ansuya Blom and Mire Lee.

"Her prose is lush as the soft insides of a husky nut shaken from the topmost branch, lush as that first millisecond after sex. She's a new force in genre fiction. I'm excited to see what she brings us next."

- Sara Saab, writer of poetry & strange fiction

contact

Email

a (dot) josephinebudge (at) gmail.com

tweet @amjamb

Ama is usually based in London, UK.

Ama Josephine Budge's A Shoal of Lovers Leads me Home is a " heady, hopeful sensorium"

- Michael Matheson, Anathema: Spec from the Margins

“Ama is exactly the kind of young writer we need, innovative, daring, fantastical and delicious, the UK’s N.K Jemisin meets Tomi Adeyemi.”

- Tosin Coker, The Mouth of Babes

Upcoming Publications

Ama Josephine Budge in conversation with Angela Chan (in) Science Fiction Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press

Series: Documents of Contemporary Art

(pub. Feb 2020)

Imaging an Assisted Evolution: The environmental futurity of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama

Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies

Issue: Curatorial Care (pub. 2020)

Speculative Fabulations: Beneath Yaba's Garden

Feminist Review

Issue: Archives (pub. 2020)

“Eugenics – Population Control.” (in) Informatics of Domination

ed. Jennifer Rhee, Zach Blas, Melody Jue, Duke University Press (pub. 2021)

Read my latest writing Online:

Well Hung: reflections on Gray Wielebinski’s "Shaved in Opposite Directions"

(non-fiction)

I walk into b.Dewitt’s pop-up gallery at 59 Hackney Road and am immediately engulfed by colours and textures: faux fur and leather, denim, defiant monochrome, and platinum blonde shaved afros...

Full article available online here..

Consented Issue 9: Environment

(fiction)

This magazine features 100 pages of art and illustration with three sections; Decolonising Environmentalism, Not So Green Capitalism & Towards Environmental Salvation. Featuring my latest story, Watching the Channel.

Purchase the magazine here...

A Shoal of Lovers Leads Me Home, (fiction)

The ocean was a toxic enemy, but this was Kwakua’s special place. Near enough to the ruins that the familiar taint of old blood plucked at her, yet far enough away so as not to harm the life that grew inside...

Read the whole story free online here..