Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is a Congolese Iranian South Africa and Sierra Leone based award-winning filmmaker (Where My Memory Began, We Will Be Who We Are), founder and creative director at the Collective for Black Iranians and co-founder and advisory board member of House of Salone, a production and creative agency that advises on critically conscious storytelling. A recovering human rights lawyer, Priscillia has worked with the UN in war affected countries negotiating the release of child soldiers in armed groups and implementing reintegration programming.

Priscillia’s first film, Where My Memory Began, a short lyrical film that tells the story of a 400-year-old Cotton tree that falls and that of an elder who returns to what’s left and tries to remember, premiered all over the world to critical acclaim (Locarno, HotDocs, NYAFF, PAFF, Aspen Shortsfest).

Priscillia’s visual storytelling is grounded in ancestral memory, intersectionality and Blackness to lyrically bear witness to Black life in its varied diasporic iterations. Her latest short film, We Will Be Who We Are won Best Experimental at BAFTA qualifying film festival, Aesthetica, and was selected by Vogue for its “Women by Women” Open Call as it continues to be celebrated (Vogue “Women by Women”, Aesthetica, NY African Film Festival, XPOSED, Festival Internacional de Curtas de São Paulo).

She is currently working on two documentary projects, A Black Girl, from Iran, and Queens of Freetown, Searching for FannyAnn.  

Her work has been written about in multiple outlets, Screendaily, Variety, BBC World, BBC Persian, AlJazeera, AJ+, Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality, France24, etc.

A product of a childhood spent being the only Black Iranian girl she ever saw in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, to staring up at the tall buildings in French projects, Priscillia has spent most of her life observing mainstream society from the margins. Her ideas and creative vision were born out of those margins. 

Priscillia is currently a PhD candidate at Cape Town University with the departments of Fine Arts and African Feminist Studies where she focuses on racial blackness in Iran. She holds dual International Law and Business degrees from Sorbonne Law, ESSEC Business School, NYU Law and is a USC Film school drop-out. 

She is a 2024 Atlantic Fellow on Racial Equity (AFRE 2024) and a United Nations 2020 Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD 2020).  

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