Board of Trustees

Manthia Diawara

Distinguished University Professor, Department of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies, New York University, USA

Manthia Diawara is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at New York University. A native of Mali, he received his education in France and continued his university studies in the United States, where he has taught at prestigious institutions such as the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania.

Diawara is a prolific writer and filmmaker whose essays on art, cinema, and politics have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, LA Times, Libération, Mediapart, and Artforum. He is the author of several significant works, including In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 1998), We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World (Basic Civitas Books, 2003), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1992), and Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (ed., Routledge, 1993).

His scholarship includes extensive publications on the film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Diawara has also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o on the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse (1995). His notable films include An Opera of the World (2017), Négritude: A Dialogue between Soyinka and Senghor (2016), and Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010).