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.
about
Ama Josephine B. Johnstone - Researcher / Pleasure Activist
Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a researcher and pleasure activist whose work navigates speculative explorations of erotics, art, ecology and Blackness. Ama is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis at Birkbeck. Her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism, with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and across the Black diaspora. Ama is the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with BARD College, and will be based in upstate New York from January 2021.
Photo Credit: Zachary Maxwell Stertz
Ama has worked with arts institutions across the UK and abroad including the ICA, Free Word, Tate, Wellcome Collection and the V&A. She has been published by Aperture, Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, the Feminist Review, Critical Arts Journal, Afropunk, The Independent Newspaper, Dispatch Feminist Moving Image, Media Diversified, Skin Deep, Consented, CHEW Magazine, B. Dewitt Gallery and Autograph ABP, and commissioned to respond to the work of artists Travis Alabanza, Zanele Muholi, Gray Wielebinski, BBZ Alternative Graduate Show and Alberta Whittle. Ama is a member of the Board of Trustees at ArtsAdmin.
Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins on the BA Culture, Criticism and Curation, London; a Lecturer on the MA Ecologies of Transformation at Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam and the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow at the Centre for Curatorial Studies and Human Rights Programme at Bard College, NY.
Book Chapters
Eugenics – Population Control
Informatics of Domination ed. Jennifer Rhee, Zach Blas, Melody Jue Duke University Press (2021)
What We Stay For
The Material Kinships Reader, Onomatopee Press (April 2021)
Pollination as Praxis: The Queer Temporalities of Intimate Ecologies
Conversations Across Place ed. Frances Whorrall-Campbell & Nicola BrandtThe Green Box Press (July, 2021)
Ama Josephine Budge in conversation with Angela Chan
Science Fiction (Documents of Contemporary Art), Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press (2018)
Journal Publications
"A City Wages Love"
Architectural Review, New Cities, (forthcoming) 2021
“No Home Left Behind”,
Architectural Review, Lands Issue, October 2020
“Speculative Fabulations: Beneath Yaba's Garden”,
Feminist Review: Archives July 2020
“Imaging an Assisted Evolution: The environmental futurity of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama”,
Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, Issue: Curatorial Care, 2019
Qualifications
PhD Psychosocial Studies - Birkbeck University (2018 - 2022)
MA Postcolonial Culture & Global Policy - Goldsmiths University of London (2015 - 2017)
BA Performance Practice - Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2009 - 2013)
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International & Local Planetary Fictions Fellowship Curatorial Frame & EVA Internationa (2021)
Keith Haring Fellow in Art & Activism, Bard College (2021)
contact
Email: ama@amajosephine.me
Insta: @amajosephine
Twitter: @pleasureprof
writing
Pleasurable Ecologies – Formations of Care: The Impossibilities of Invitation
Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 3, Archive Books and Frame Contemporary Art Finland, September 2021
(Commission) In Search of God, Dirt, and Ecstasy
HOLDING THE LINE - A refrain in two parts (Film) and DIS-A Lesson in Reversal or Unlearning, 2021
Leap
Platform London, January 2021
Ama Josephine Budge in Conversation with Angela Chan
in Science Fiction, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2020
Of Parables, Patterns, and Progeny — Rethinking Trans Theory with Octavia E. Butler
Think Pieces by the UCL IAS Review, Ama Josephine Budge & Christine ‘Xine’ Yao, Issue 2: Turbulence
Fragments of Exercises For Learning How To Remember/ To Member The Harems Tha Haunt, DelicatelyHow Flexible Can We Make The Mouth - Alberta Whittle, 2019
BBZ 2019 Graduate Show: From Loneliness into Abundance
Afropunk, September 2019
(Commission) Well Hung: reflections on Gray Wielebinski’s Shaved in Opposite Directions
(Fiction) Watching the Channel
Consented Magazine, Issue 7: Environmentalism, 2019
(Fiction) A Shoal of Lovers Leads me Home
Anathema Spec from the Margins, Issue 5, Canada, 2018
(Comission) Rupturous Desires: Queer Bodies Are Made from Mountains
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Aperture, 2018
Just Like Us: Queer Intimacies Familiar
Chew Magazine, Issue 1, Toronto, 2018
Consented Magazine, Issue 5: Love & Desire, 2018
Skin Deep Magazine, Issue 7: The Food Issue, 2017
Wodo Nublanuito - Last One Correct
Mixed-Race, Queer, Feminist(MRQF) Zine, Issue 3: I am a bridge // I am not your bridge, 2017
The Future Belongs to Gastropods
Consented Magazine, Issue 3: Gender, 2017
HYSTERIA RADICAL FEMINIST PERIODICAL, issues 3,4,5 (2015 - 2016)