Ama Josephine Budge - Writer / Artist / Curator
Ama Josephine Budge is a British-Ghanaian Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist who explores the kinships between Blackness, feminism, decolonial aesthetics, queer erotics and ecology to form a praxis she has named Intimate Ecologies, working toward liberatory interspecies futures.
Usually based in London, Ama can also be found loitering around the fried egg stalls of Accra, or gallery bookshops in New York City.
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Ama Josephine Budge - Writer / Artist / Curator
Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose praxis navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities...
Usually based in London, Ama can also be found loitering around the fried egg stalls of Accra, or gallery bookshops in New York City.
For speaking invitations: assistant@amajosephine.me
For projects proposals:
ama@amajosephine.me
Insta @amajosephine
Twitter @pleasureproff
Recent/Upcoming Events
Art for a Climate Changed World
As the climate talks unfold in Brazil, join in an intimate conversation, ‘Art for a Climate Changed World’, with artist, activist, and creative strategist Suzanne Dhaliwal and Dr. Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, to explore what an expanded sense of art might look like in response to the climate crisis.
This event is part of the very first London Art+Climate Week — a five-day citywide celebration of creativity, community, and climate action.
Hosted at Mimosa House
4-6pm, 15th November 2025
Water Bodies
Cultural Reforesting Exhibition
Ama will be presenting two new works as part of her ongoing Water Bodies series:
Water Bodies: The Ghosts that Grow from Our Debris - Dreaming Dead and River Remnants & Water Bodies: Homage to Haunting
Presented at the Cultural Reforesting Exhibition at the Orleans House Gallery, Richmond, London
27 March - 31 August 2025
Cultural Reforesting Exhibition
Orleans House Gallery
Cultural Reforesting brings together a group of artists, the pulsating environment of Orleans House Gallery’s woodland and gardens, and all who step (or fly, or crawl or take root) into the gallery ecosystem to re-engage our human animal.
Many of the artworks in this exhibition are a result of our Cultural Reforesting programme, which has supported artists research projects since 2021. Each artist’s research has its own focus, touching on the complexity of the ecological crisis. They consider how each of us might respond to the crisis, as an imaginative collaborator in – and contributor to – all our ecosystems.
27 March – 31 August 2025
Dark Water Thames: Twixt Land and Sea, Past and Present
Orleans House Gallery
During this event Ama invites you to join her on a river walk where you will gift the ‘anti-monument’ back to the water as you think about how the river is as a site of history, folklore and possibility. There is also the opportunity to remember the stories of those who arrived upon its shores filled with dreams and those for whom the Thames is a sacred passage between past, present and future.
After the river walk there will be refreshments, a film screening and talk by academics from St Mary’s University at Orleans House Gallery.
9 November 2024
Dream This Silly
QueerCircle
This Autumn, one hundred and forty LGBTQ artists aged 18-28 are coming together from across the UK to exhibit at QUEERCIRCLE. With no judging panel, we have accepted all works submitted, in aid of building careers, confidence and creative community and removing barriers to the arts.
October 04 - December 06
Intimate Ecologies: a Black feminist erotics for interspecies un/worlding
Feminist Lecture Program
This talk draws on a richly textured landscape of Black feminist; queer and Native theory visual cultures; postnatural studies
and decolonial environmental humanities.Participants will be invited to re-think binary subject positions such as ""the human"" and ""nature"" in a speculative rehearsal of liberatory interspecies futures where, as adrienne maree brown has called for: the pleasure of the most oppressed is centred. In such an un/world, I argue, we can all thrive. This session offers an introduction to speculative writer, artist and scholar Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone's research and practice: Intimate Ecologies.
22nd April 2024.
Black to the Future Panel
Brown Suga
Celebrate March's International Women's Day, with queer women and non-binary folx. Led and curated by queer Black and POC folx! We will be having a Black to The Future discussion with topics surrounding Afrofuturism and Black women in the film industry with renowned writers, and actors from 7:30 pm.
23rd March 2024.
Science Fiction as Activism: Queer Futures / Future Queers
Queer Youth Art Collective
Open-to-all writing workshop in which we will co-create a shared space to dream the future worlds, loves, chosen families, and interspecies kin that could shape our queer futures. We will have fun with absurd microfictions, collectively build future queer characters and worlds for them to thrive in and begin a short story of your very own.
18 February 2024.
Space | Time | Life: a gathering
Wysing Arts Centre
reading from an exclusive extract of my in-progress novella ‘Dawn in Arborellum’
09 February 2024.
International Black Speculative Writing Festival
Goldsmiths University
Science Fiction as Activism Writing Workshop by Ama Josephine Budge.
02 February 2024.
The Roots of Our Hands as Deep as Revolt: entangled colonialities of the green
Nyabinghi Lab
Artist talk with Ama Josephine Budge, discussing her work 'DeComPosure' in conversation with Aouefa Amoussouvi.
13 January 2024
Recent Publications
Afra Eisma
Page Not Found is pleased to announce the publication of splashdown tender, the first major monograph by afra eisma, co-published by Page Not Found. The book is co-published by Page Not Found and will be released on the opening night. This project is made possible with support from the Municipality of The Hague. More information at Page Not Found.
Launched September 24th, 2025
Purchase here
Open Gender Journal
No. 1 (2025): Special Issue: membra(I)nes - Technologies, Theories and Aesthetics of (Im)permeability
Under the conceptual metaphor "membra(I)nes," the 12th annual conference of the German Association for Gender Studies (June 15–17, 2023) was for the first time explicitly dedicated to approaches to intersectional gender research based on media, art, and cultural studies perspectives. The fact that the conference was also held for the first time at art academies and in the East German cities of Leipzig and Halle (Saale) continued the thematic focus on transgression and permeability at a structural level. This special issue further explores, deepens, and expands upon the reflections beyond the ephemeral format of the conference and makes them publicly accessible.
Read here
Sans titre : une incantation pour les futures mères
Coming Soon Exhibition Catalogue
Lafayette Anticipations
2024
Read here
Pollination as Praxis: The
Queer Temporalities of
Intimate Ecologies
INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries
2023
read here
Black Ecology: Resistance, Poetics and Imaginaries
Nyabinghi Lab
“The Resiliency Garden is a reimagining of space and an example of what can happen when Black people take control of space and regenerate it as a catalyst for freedom, healing, and liberation. The space lives at the intersection of food, climate, and racial justice and is an homage to a future that serves us all, not just a select few.” – Duron Chavis (urban farmer, educator, change maker)
26 November 2023
Locating Blackness In Intimate Ecologies
C& and C&AL Print Issue #12
2023
read here
Subtle Intimacies – Insistent Shadows
UNCHORUS, Freelands Foundation
2023
read here
IMPORTANCE OF DANCING WITH MICROBES
Interview on Medium, with Infrasonic
Published October 2020
Read here
Imaging an Assisted Evolution: The Environmental Futurity of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama
Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies
Issue: Issue 6: Ecologies of Care: Speculative Photographies, Curatorial Re-Positionings
Published January 2020
