Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is a black Iranian Cape Town-based 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 experience with storytelling and filmmaking expanded into the founding of the Collective for Black Iranians (2020) where she has directed and produced a slate of micro films and documentaries centering Black Iranian narratives in Iran and its diaspora. Her work as a storyteller has been written about in multiple outlets, BBC World, BBC Persian, AlJazeera, AJ+, Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality, France24, etc.

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 first short film, Where My Memory Began has been selected in prestigious film festivals (HotDocs, NYAFF, PAFF, Aspen Shortsfest) and her latest short film, We Will Be Who We Are, is currently in the festival circuit. Priscillia has been working on her first feature documentary, The Queens of Freetown, searching for FannyAnn, for over a year. 

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. She holds dual International Law and Business degrees from Sorbonne Law, ESSEC Business School, NYU Law and is a USC Film school drop-out. 

Priscillia lives in Cape Town where she balances her filmmaking, research, the Collective for Black Iranians with productions and narrative consulting for the UN. She is a 2024 Atlantic Fellow on Racial Equity and a United Nations 2020 Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD 2020).  

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