Name: Capturing "Between": Yusuf Ahmed and Andina Marie Osorio in Conversation
Start: 2025-03-12T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-03-12T20:00:00-04:00
Location: The Africa Center

Join us on Wednesday, March 12 at 6:30PM for a talk with artists Yusuf Ahmed and Andina Marie Osorio, moderated by scholar Joyous R. Pierce.
About this Event

Join us on Wednesday, March 12th at 6:30PM as The Africa Center presents Capturing “Between”: Yusuf Ahmed and Andina Marie Osorio in Conversation with Joyous R. Pierce. This program brings together photographers Yusuf Ahmed and Andina Marie Osorio in conversation with scholar Joyous R. Pierce about the importance of visual art and personal archives in navigating the various states of "betweenness" that affect the African Diaspora.

Yusuf Ahmed's debut exhibition Between Nostalgia & Dreams is currently on view at The Africa Center. In Between Nostalgia & Dreams, Ahmed explores what we choose to remember, what faces erasure, and which stories endure. Through fifteen photographic stories tracing connections from Nairobi to New York, Addis Ababa to Ohio, Ahmed explores and archives personal histories of adoption, ancestry, and finding community after coming out, and reflects on how we hold onto identities that now seem distant.

Yusuf Ahmed:

Yusuf Ahmed is an Ethiopian-American documentary filmmaker, photographer, and communications strategist based in New York City. Yusuf’s work in documentary portraiture and film examines contemporary conditions of globalization and how it impacts the construction of memory, identity, and notions of belonging. Yusuf received his B.A in international relations and communications from Denison University. He has directed, produced, and documented projects across Africa and the Middle East tackling diverse issues including migration, heritage conservation, agriculture, and disease elimination.

He recently produced the short film "The Fly Collectors" in Senegal and is currently directing and producing his first feature film "Love Belt." Yusuf's photography exhibition "Between Nostalgia and Dreams" is on view at the Africa Center in New York City starting from February 5th, 2025.

Andina Marie Osorio:

Andina Marie Osorio is an Afro-Caribbean artist from the Bronx, currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Osorio’s practice explores the intersections of memory, identity, queer affect, migration, and Black femme sexual politics through assemblage, self portraiture and archival work centered on the familial and queer experience.

Her work has been exhibited at the LES Gallery at The Clemente, Webber Gallery, and Anonymous Gallery, and has been featured in publications like Musée Magazine, Port Magazine, and Elephant Magazine. She was awarded the Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund and was a finalist for The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers. In 2024, she was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Fire Island Artist Residency, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.

Osorio earned her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the Yale School of Art.

Joyous R. Pierce:

Joyous R. Pierce (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary curator/space shaper, artist, and researcher whose practice re-envisions ceremonies of creation and collaboration through intrinsic relationality and care. Her work as an arts and cultural producer engages creative and cultural spaces as liberatory sites for transformation, reflection, connection, expansion, and joy.

Joyous holds a Bachelor’s degree from Muhlenberg College in International Relations with a concentration in Peace and Conflict Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa, and a Master of Science in International Relations and the Politics of Africa from SOAS, University of London. Some areas of interest include contemporary afro-indigenous migration, seabed mapping & ecosystems in the marine water column, immersive technology, and having way too many tabs open at any given moment.

She has collaborated with artists internationally and with institutions such as the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, the Guggenheim, the African Artists Foundation, the Apollo, Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Barnard, Burning Man, and Google. She was a fellow in Cycle IV of the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship with the Caribbean Cultural African Diaspora Institute (Harlem) and Curatorial Fellow at Nafasi Artspace (Dar es Salaam) and is the current Curatorial Fellow at New York Artist Residency and Studio Foundation.

Events are free and open to all. Registration does not guarantee entrance, so we recommend that you arrive early.