Photographed by riel Sturchio.

Iowa City, 2026.

Esé Emmanuel is a writer, artist, and curator attentive to the forms of things, and the ways they escape formation. They think across architectures, black poetics, third cinema, and other visual, textual and material cultures.

Esé is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa where they have been awarded the 2025 Roxanne Mueller Prize and the 2026 Thesis Fellowship. 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). 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 in PARSE Journal, A Long House Magazine, Black Camera, TriQuarterly and elsewhere.

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. They are also a co-curator at the center for afrofuturist studies.

Esé is working on a book of prose, alongside several screen and text-based installation projects. They teach creative writing and critical thought at the University of Iowa and elsewhere. They may be contacted via email or instagram.

ESÉ EMMANUEL