Petna Katondolo is a Congolese filmmaker, educator, and ancestral ecologist whose artistic works are acclaimed for their decolonial African futurism. For Petna, questions of sovereignty and narrative control have been at the heart of his work as a filmmaker, educator, and community organizer for several decades. Starting with the philosophy, practices, and experiences developed at Yole!Africa, the cultural center that he founded in 2000, Petna's keynote will expand into a broader conversation about what sovereignty truly means in a world shaped by extraction, displacement, technological transformation, and the ongoing struggle for communities to tell their own stories.
Biographies:
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo (Mwalimu) is an acclaimed Congolese filmmaker, ancestral ecologist, and educator working at the intersection of land, memory, and narrative sovereignty. He is the founder of Yole!Africa in Goma, DR Congo, and a leading voice within the Basandja Coalition, advancing Indigenous and grassroots stewardship across the Congo Basin. His cinematic practice, Soul-full Soil Cinema, approaches film as a form of listening to land, community, and history. His internationally awarded work engages questions of extraction, technology, and power from grounded indigenous realities. Petna developed AgroLiberation, linking food, culture, and cooperative economies with displaced and local communities. He has held three filmmaker-in-residence appointments in the UC Irvine Film & Media Studies Department. He is a co-founder of the Alec Glasser Center for the Power of Music and Social Change at UC Irvine.
An internationally renowned curator, educator, and veteran nonprofit executive, Dominic Asmall Willsdon (he/they) founded the film program at Tate Modern in London with the British Film Institute in his first curatorial role. He went on to join the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs from 2006-18. At SFMOMA, he relaunched the film program beginning with a season of Werner Herzog’s films and Wide Lens, a documentary series co-organized with AMPAS. In partnership with SFFILM, Willsdon created Modern Cinema, a reinvention of SFMOMA’s commitment to film in the context of visual art. From 2018, as Executive Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Willsdon committed the nascent ICA to film programming, notably through a partnership with the annual Afrikana Independent Film Festival. Throughout his career, Willsdon has developed programs that combined screenings with public dialogue and education, featuring documentary filmmakers such as John Akomfrah, Sam Green, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Pratibha Parmar, and Anand Patwardhan. In addition to these leadership roles, Willsdon has served as a curator for international contemporary art biennials: the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013) and the Liverpool Biennial, UK (2016). He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. Willsdon is originally from London, England, his family having migrated there from South Africa and India in the 1960s. He was raised in the west of England (by parents who met in film school), and educated in art history and philosophy at the Universities of Edinburgh, Essex, and Paris.
Petna Katondolo is a Congolese filmmaker, educator, and ancestral ecologist whose artistic works are acclaimed for their decolonial African futurism. For Petna, questions of sovereignty and narrative control have been at the heart of his work as a filmmaker, educator, and community organizer for several decades. Starting with the philosophy, practices, and experiences developed at Yole!Africa, the cultural center that he founded in 2000, Petna's keynote will expand into a broader conversation about what sovereignty truly means in a world shaped by extraction, displacement, technological transformation, and the ongoing struggle for communities to tell their own stories.
Biographies:
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo (Mwalimu) is an acclaimed Congolese filmmaker, ancestral ecologist, and educator working at the intersection of land, memory, and narrative sovereignty. He is the founder of Yole!Africa in Goma, DR Congo, and a leading voice within the Basandja Coalition, advancing Indigenous and grassroots stewardship across the Congo Basin. His cinematic practice, Soul-full Soil Cinema, approaches film as a form of listening to land, community, and history. His internationally awarded work engages questions of extraction, technology, and power from grounded indigenous realities. Petna developed AgroLiberation, linking food, culture, and cooperative economies with displaced and local communities. He has held three filmmaker-in-residence appointments in the UC Irvine Film & Media Studies Department. He is a co-founder of the Alec Glasser Center for the Power of Music and Social Change at UC Irvine.
An internationally renowned curator, educator, and veteran nonprofit executive, Dominic Asmall Willsdon (he/they) founded the film program at Tate Modern in London with the British Film Institute in his first curatorial role. He went on to join the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs from 2006-18. At SFMOMA, he relaunched the film program beginning with a season of Werner Herzog’s films and Wide Lens, a documentary series co-organized with AMPAS. In partnership with SFFILM, Willsdon created Modern Cinema, a reinvention of SFMOMA’s commitment to film in the context of visual art. From 2018, as Executive Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Willsdon committed the nascent ICA to film programming, notably through a partnership with the annual Afrikana Independent Film Festival. Throughout his career, Willsdon has developed programs that combined screenings with public dialogue and education, featuring documentary filmmakers such as John Akomfrah, Sam Green, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Pratibha Parmar, and Anand Patwardhan. In addition to these leadership roles, Willsdon has served as a curator for international contemporary art biennials: the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013) and the Liverpool Biennial, UK (2016). He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. Willsdon is originally from London, England, his family having migrated there from South Africa and India in the 1960s. He was raised in the west of England (by parents who met in film school), and educated in art history and philosophy at the Universities of Edinburgh, Essex, and Paris.
