Short Films Screening and Discussion with Tsedaye Makonnen

This gathering of short films extends the conversations at the heart of Tsedaye Makonnen's Sanctuary :: መቅደስ :: Mekdes, where remembrance becomes ritual, light becomes witness, and storytelling becomes a practice of collective care. Moving across continents, generations, and speculative futures, these artists illuminate the ways bodies carry histories of displacement, resilience, devotion, and liberation. Whether through dance, prayer, labor, performance, or dream, each film imagines sanctuary as a living practice—one rooted in ancestral knowledge, Black feminist worldmaking, and the radical insistence that another future remains possible.
Together, these works transform the cinema into a temporary sacred space, inviting us to gather, remember, and imagine otherwise.

Following the film screenings, join artist Tsedaye Makonnen, filmmaker Adeyemi Michael, and scholar and writer Nahier Tafere in a discussion to process these films together.

*Limited seating.*

Adeyemi Michael, an award-winning filmmaker, graduated in directing from the National Film and Television School. His breakout film Sodiq premiered at Sheffield DocFest and received both a Grierson and Al Jazerra award. His Fantasy film Entitled won Best Short at the Screen Nation Awards and Best Debut Director at Edinburgh TV Fest in 2019. He directed BBC1’s M**der on the Streets in 2018. Michael collaborated with Netflix in 2020, curating the collection "Black British Stories." His 2021 film The Future Isn't What It Used To Be was nominated at Toronto International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Chicago International Film Festival. Other shorts include Dark Matter and Photographer in Focus: Aida Muluneh (Nowness). In 2023 he directed BBC/Netflix's Champion and Amazon’s Anansi Boys released in 2025 . In 2025 he was named a Directing Fellow at the inaugural Spike Lee Directors Lab at the Red Sea Film Festival. He recently directed the four-part series Erased: WW2’s Heroes of Color for National Geographic. He has two feature films in development: Ibeji for BBC Films and Emi for Film4.

Nahier Tafere is a Eritrean-American scholar of Black Rebellion and Film, a writer, and community archivist. She recently graduated from Williams College and is a student at Haile Gerima's Sankofa Film Institute.

Tsedaye Makonnen is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, a mother, and a former birth worker. Her light sculptures, textiles, and performance art function as a contemporary reflection of Byzantine and Medieval art, particularly through her engagement with spiritual symbolism and technologies, sacred aesthetics, and embodied ritual practices. Makonnen reclaims, reinterprets, and reactivates visual and spiritual lineages historically sidelined by Western art canons. Her recent achievements include an installation of several works from sculpture to textiles acquired by The Nelson-Atkins Museum in 2026, as well as exhibiting and performing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s "Africa and Byzantium" exhibition in 2023-2024, where she was one of two living artists commissioned for new works. Her light sculptures were acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in 2021 and are currently on view in Sanctuary :: መቅደስ :: Mekdes. An Astral Sea textile is a part of Studio Museum’s permanent collection. Sacred :: የተቀደሰ :: Yetekedse is on view in The Walters Art Museum. She has performed at the Venice Biennale including Spring 2026. She was a Clark Art Institute Fellow, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and co-curated the traveling exhibit Ethiopia at the Crossroads, which won the Apollo Awards for Exhibition of the Year. In 2024 she archived oral histories of Ethiopian communities in D.C. with support from the Library of Congress, and is now working with a collective from the diaspora to expand the archive with support from the Mellon Foundation. Makonnen was engaged in a multi-year collaboration as a visiting artist with Williams College Museum of Art, Williams ‘62 Center of Theater & Dance, and The Clark that resulted in a large-scale cross-institutional land activation across the Berkshires. Her roster includes EFA Printshop, Bard Graduate Center, The Kitchen, NMWA, Albuquerque Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, and more. She currently lives in D.C. with her children and partner.

Image credit: Tsedaye Makonnen headshot by Nakeya Brown; Adeyemi Michael headshot by Mathieu Ajan; Nahier Tafere headshot by Abel E.