Esé Emmanuel is a writer (of essays & near-fiction), an anti-disciplinary artist, and curator working at the intersections of black poetics, third cinema and west african cultural histories. Using text, moving image and other such pliable material, they re-present and problematize the afterlives of coloniality in the deceptively benign symbols and narratives that constitute contemporary life.

Esé is currently completing their Master of Fine Arts degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa where they won the 2025 Roxanne Mueller Award.

They were the 2023 - 2024 Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellow at A Long House Magazine and a 2023 writer-in-residence at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora. They were also the managing editor of Reading Ecologies, published in 2025 by MISS READ (Berlin), AFRIKADAA (Paris) and Mosaïques (Yaoundé).

They are currently a co-curator of littoral, an undisciplined project, a site for experimental black study, animating the west african coast as a theoretical, aesthetic and archival framework; and monangambee, a nomadic decolonial microcinema based in lagos and focused on projecting third cinema and other cinematic movements from the global south.

Esé was a 2023 - 2025 Art Exchange, Moving Image Curatorial Fellow, and in 2024, they were an Archives of the Nigerian Left creative project grantee. Their work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the British Council, Goethe-Institut, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (YSF), LUX, Public Space One, the Center for AfroFuturist Studies, and others.

They have work published or forthcoming in PARSE Journal, A Long House Magazine, Black Camera, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. Esé is currently working on a number of essays around language, a book of indeterminate genre, alongside several video and textual installation projects. They are a writing instructor at the University of Iowa.

They may be contacted via email or instagram.

Photographed by Nipah Dennis. Accra, 2023.

ESÉ EMMANUEL