Honorary Graduate June Givanni | SOAS Graduation 2018 | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 14/11/2018

June Givanni became a Honorary Graduate at the 2018 SOAS Graduation, the citation was given by Dr Lindiwe Dovey.

June Givanni is a leading film curator and consultant in African and African diaspora cinema, having worked in the sector for over three decades.

June Givanni came to the UK as a child from British Guiana in 1957 and works as an expert in the field of Panafrican cinema on four continents. She has worked with the British Film Institute where she ran the African and Caribbean Film Unit and was the founding editor of the Black Film Bulletin with Gaylene Gould.  June Givanni has worked on the Toronto International Film Festival, where she programmed Planet Africa.  She has also programmed with the Celebration of Black Cinema in Boston (USA); Creteil Women’s Film Festival (France); Images Caribes (Martinique); Pan African Film Festival of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso); International Film Festival of Kerala; African International Film Festival (AFRIFF, Nigeria) and Colours of the Nile Film Festival (Ethiopia).  She has also worked in film production and development with the Martiniquan filmmaker Euzhan Palcy, the Focus Features Africa First Programme, she is a Board Member of the Imagine Film Institute of Burkina Faso, and many others.

June Givanni has worked to stage major events around African and African diaspora cinema in the UK, dating back to 1983 with the Greater London Council’s Third Eye Film Festival; the 1995 Screen Griots Programme of events and Conference on African cinema at the British Film Institute; and edited the resulting book Symbolic Narratives African Cinema. She continues programming at international festivals and is currently developing the ‘June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive’ based on collections from her years of working in this field.   The work of the archive has been included in gallery shows in the Netherlands (Van Abbe Museum 2016) and in the Time is Here show, (Nottingham Contemporary), the South London Gallery 2017 and at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam 2018.