Pro
Sophia Nahli Allison
Biography
Sophia Nahli Allison is a black queer radical dreamer, experimental documentary filmmaker + photographer. She disrupts conventional documentary methods by reimagining the archives and excavating hidden truths. A meditation of the spirit, her work conjures ancestral memories to explore the intersection of fiction and non-fiction storytelling.
She is a 2020 United States Artists Fellow in Film and has held residencies at MacDowell, The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France., The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and POV Spark's African Interactive Art Residency. She is a recipient of a 2014 Chicago 3Arts Award and was named the 2017 Student Video Photographer of the Year by the White House News Photographers Association. She has received grants from the Sundance Institute New Frontier Lab Programs, Glassbreaker Films, Getty Images and more. She holds a Master’s Degree in visual journalism from UNC and an undergraduate degree in photojournalism from Columbia College Chicago.
Past projects have been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Root, with Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA, and more. Her 2019 short documentary A Love Song For Latasha premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, received the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at AFI Fest, and Best Documentary Short awards at the New Orleans Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and more including an IDA Documentary Awards Nomination.