Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is a Freetown-based filmmaker, creative director and founder at the Collective for Black Iranians. She is a former human rights lawyer who has negotiated with armed groups for the release of child soldiers and designed programmes for their reintegration and family reunification. Her work in juvenile justice includes the design of programmes for the rehabilitation of children incarcerated for their association to terrorist groups such as Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army or Al Qaeda for the Maghreb.

Priscillia’s visual storytelling focuses on telling stories that center lesser known Black intersectional identities, their experiences, histories and the points of view formed in our societies past and present. She grounds her visual storytelling in ancestral memory, intersectionality and Blackness to lyrically bear witness to Black life in its varied diasporic iterations.

Priscillia has disrupted the Iranian narrative on identity worldwide by building a Black Iranian point of view, creating language and producing stories from a vantage point never acknowledged before as being part of any Iranian reality. A product of a childhood spent being the only Black Iranian girl she ever saw in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, to staring up at the tall buildings in French projects, Priscillia has spent most of her life observing mainstream society from the margins. Her ideas and creative vision were born out of those margins.

Priscillia holds dual International Law and Business degrees from Sorbonne Law, ESSEC Business School, NYU Law and is a USC Film school drop-out.

Her work has been featured in BBC World, AlJazeera, France 24, BBC Persian and more.

Priscillia lives in Freetown, Sierra Leone where she leads Haus of Salone, a production and creative agency and advises on critically conscious storytelling. She is completing two short films she has written and directed, Where My Memory Began and Bɔi, as well as her first feature, The Door to Tamba.