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The NCU Emerging Media Fellowship was founded in 2016 to commemorate the contributions of Nonso Christian Ugbode, BPM’s first director of digital initiatives. The fellowship is designed specifically for young artists who are producing their first independent digital media project.
Ethel (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) was named an NCU Fellow in 2024. She is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator and creative researcher exploring memory in Africa and its diaspora. Image-making, storytelling, and time-traveling compose the framework of her inquiry. From collage to moving image, Ethel examines space and time-based technologies often from a speculative lens. Her burgeoning curatorial practice took form in an inaugural exhibition titled ‘African Ancient Futures,’ and continues to expand in myriad audiovisual experiments. Ethel is a recipient of the Magnum Foundation 2022 Counter Histories Grant-Program for her project “Image Frequency Modulation,” which was also recently selected by the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2023 DocLab Forum.
Georgiana was named an NCU Fellow in 2023. At the time, she was a junior at Alabama A&M University studying Computer Science with a background in machine learning, where she has interned at companies like Rockstar Games, Apple, and Activision. She will be an incoming Microsoft Research intern where she will focus on building applications in creative AI and was a previous Black Ambition Prize HBCU Winner. Outside of machine learning, she is a co-founder for Squidpunk, a collaborative studio focused on creating diverse animated and interactive experiences, and co-producer for Howard University’s Film Organization upcoming anthology series “Where’s Everybody At?” (2023). You can find her replaying her favorite video games and reading fanfiction about her favorite characters.
Blanca was named an NCU Fellow in 2022. At the time, she was a graduating senior International Studies major attending Spelman College. Throughout her matriculation through Spelman, she was able to explore how her love of storytelling, art, and creating communities could come together in a way that she could make a career. She is the founder and CEO of Culturally Kreative a publishing company that focuses on bringing emerging technologies to young readers. As a result of her work creating Culturally Kreative, she has been accepted as a fellow for Spelman College’s inaugural Entrepreneurship Fellowship and the Black Girl Venture NextGen Fellowship.
BY JOSIE V. WILLIAMS
Kian was named an NCU Fellow in 2020. An activist at heart and artist by trade, his focus resides at the intersection of storytelling, social justice and technology. As the founder and leader of RXNIN LIFE, an independent production house, Kian’s work is diverse, ranging from music, to films, comics and AR/VR. His most notable work is his photography of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement in Washington, DC, which was featured in the Washington Post and auctioned off for the VTF NABJ scholarship fund. He has spoken on several panels addressing diversity, social justice, storytelling and technology, including at BPM’s 2022 Black Media Story Summit on Vaccine Equity in Baltimore; and the 2020 Consumer Electronic Symposium in Las Vegas. He taught workshops for Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore Youth Film Arts program and The University of Maryland’s Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House while finishing production on his docutrilogy “Free The People.” As a Saul Zaentz Fellow and an honorary BPM 360+ Incubator fellow, Kian was awarded the inaugural BPM Nonso Christian Ugbode Digital Media fellowship to complete an AR demo of his comic book, “BLACKGUARD.”