Biography

P. Sam Kessie is an American-based Ghanaian-British writer, film/video maker, and educator. Her work employs cinema, performance, and speculative fiction to investigate intersectional identities in social class, power, and gender. She writes about the relationship between humans and technology using ritual acts, recreating myths as her authentic way of portraying mental health on the screen. She is obsessed with intimacy, desire, and transcendence.

Kessie’s work compels the body to act as the encounter between interior and exterior. She seeks to express spirituality by following raw, fractured, and wounded characters using cinematic tools and body language to share a visceral experience. An alumna of the Berlinale Talent Campus, Kessie has participated with her upcoming feature debut, formerly titled 'Unbalanced', at Produire au Sud Script Studio, Open Doors Co-production Market, and Durban FilmMart. She has exhibited her work at the National Geographic Society, Carthage Film Festival, Iowa Public Access Television, American Dance Festival, Dance on Camera Festival co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Museum of Impossible Forms in Finland.

Kessie continues experimenting with unconventional ideas of employing ritual acts to portray mental health from a marginalized point of view. She lives and produces work across the US and Ghana through her production company, Sankofa Pictures.