Abdalla Uba Adamu is Professor of Media and Cultural Communication, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. He is currently the Vice‐Chancellor, National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). His research focus is on interfaces between African Islamicate cultures and contemporary popular culture. His recent publications include “Controversies and Restrictions of Visual Representation of Prophets in Northern Nigerian Popular Culture” (Journal of African Media Studies, 9(1): 17–31).

Moradewun Adejunmobi is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of two books: J.J. Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar, and Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non‐Native Languages in West Africa. Her research on Nigerian film, media, and performance has appeared in Popular Communication, Cultural Critique, Black Camera and Cinema Journal among others.

Akin Adesokan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and of Cinema and Media Studies at the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Roots in the Sky, a novel; Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, a critical study; and Celebrating D.O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and World Literary History, a co‐edited volume on the work of Daniel Fagunwa, the pioneer Yoruba novelist. His writings have also appeared in AGNI, Screen, Glänta, Social Dynamics, African Affairs, Black Camera, Research in African Literatures, Frame, and Textual Practice, as well as in numerous edited volumes. He is a Contributing Editor of The Chimurenga Chronic, the Cape Town‐based journal of politics and ideas.

Karen Bouwer is Professor of French in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of San Francisco. Her ongoing research interests include Francophone African literature, African cinema, gender and, more recently, literary and cinematic representations of urban spaces. Her abiding interest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo culminated in the publication of her book Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Jacques de Villiers is a doctoral student at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa, where he is busy writing a dissertation on temporality in African cinemas and teaches part‐time. He is also an award‐winning documentary and fiction film editor, whose work has played at major festivals around the world, including Sundance, Berlin, and Rotterdam.

Vlad Dima is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published numerous articles, mainly on French and Francophone cinemas, but also on Francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. He is the author of Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films (2017, Indiana University Press). He is currently working on a second project titled, The Beautiful Skin: Clothing, Football and Fantasy in West African Cinema, 1964–2014.

Lindiwe Dovey is Reader in Screen Arts and Industries and the Chair of the Centre for Media and Film Studies at SOAS University of London. She co‐founded Film Africa and the Cambridge African Film Festival, festivals which she has also directed, and she works as a film curator and filmmaker. She has published widely on screen media, and her most recent book is Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals (2015), which Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director of the Toronto International Film Festival) has called “an essential read.”

Rachel Gabara teaches Francophone African and European literature and film at the University of Georgia. She is the author of From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person (Stanford, 2006), and her essays on African film in a global context appear in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Wayne State, 2007), Global Art Cinema (Oxford, 2010), and The Global Auteur: Politics and Philosophy in 21st Century Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016). She is currently at work on a book‐length project on documentary film in West and Central Africa.

Carmela Garritano is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Film Studies at Texas A&M University. She is author of African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History (Ohio University Press), a 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and winner of the African Literature Association Best First Book award. Her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE and the West African Research Association, and her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in African Studies Review, Black Camera, Cinema Journal, Critical Arts, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Research in African Literatures.

Suzanne Gauch is the author of Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements (2016) and Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (2007), as well as numerous articles on African film and literature. She teaches gender, film, and postcolonial studies in the Department of English at Temple University.

Lindsey Green‐Simms is Assistant Professor of Literature at American University, Washington, DC. Her book Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa is published by University of Minnesota Press (2017). She has also published articles in Research in African Literature, Camera Obscura, Transition, and the Journal of African Cinemas. She is currently drafting a manuscript on queer African cinema.

Kenneth W. Harrow is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Michigan State University with specializations in African literature and cinema. He has taught in the Université de Yaounde and l’Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. He is the author of Thresholds of Change in African Literature (Heinemann, 1994), Less Than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women’s Writing (Heinemann, 2002; trans. as Moins d’un et double, L’Harmattan, 2007), Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (Indiana University Press, 2007), and Trash! A Study of African Cinema Viewed from Below (Indiana University Press, 2013). He has edited numerous collections on such topics as Islam and African literature, African cinema, and women in African cinema.

Jonathan Haynes is Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar, he wrote Cinema and Social Change in West Africa (1995) with Onookome Okome and edited Nigerian Video Films (1997, 2000) and a special issue of Journal of African Cinemas (2012). His new book is Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres from University of Chicago Press (2016).

MaryEllen Higgins is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny. Her books include The Western in the Global South (Routledge, 2015, co‐edited with Rita Kerestezi and Dayna Oscherwitz) and Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (Ohio University Press, 2012). She has published articles in Research in African Literatures, African Studies Review, African Literature Today, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other scholarly venues. She is the associate producer of two films: Jean‐Pierre Bekolo’s Naked Reality (2016) and Bekolo’s Les Choses et les mots de Mudimbe (2015).

Justin Izzo is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Brown University. His research deals with literature, film, anthropology, and philosophy from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. He is the author of Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic, forthcoming with Duke University Press. Current and forthcoming publications include articles in Research in African Literatures, Small Axe, African Studies Review, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.

Alessandro Jedlowski is a Belgian Scientific Research Fund (F.R.S.‐FNRS) post‐doctoral fellow in anthropology at the University of Liège (Belgium) and a lecturer in African Studies at the University of Turin (Italy). His main research interests include African cinema and media, urban cultures, media and migration, and South‐South media exchanges. He is the author of numerous publications, including essays in academic journals such as Television and New Media, African Affairs,Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Journal of African Cinemas, and the co‐editor of the books Cine‐Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa (Michigan State University Press, 2018) and Mobility between Africa, Asia and Latin America: Economic Networks and Cultural Interactions (Zed Books, 2017).

Valérie K. Orlando is Professor of French and Francophone Literatures in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which are The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950–1979 (University of Virginia Press, 2017) and New African Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017). She has written numerous articles and chapters in books on Francophone writing from the Caribbean, North and West Africa, the African diaspora, African Cinema, and French literature and culture.

Dayna Oscherwitz is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Chair of the Department of World Languages at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She is author of Past Forward: French Cinema and the Postcolonial Heritage (SIU Press, 2010) and co‐editor, with MaryEllen Higgins and Rita Keresztesi of The Western in the Global South (Routledge, 2015) and has published widely on French and francophone African cinema.

P. Julie Papaioannou is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY. Her teaching and research interests include French and Francophone literature and film, literary and postcolonial theory, feminist and film theories.

Sheila Petty is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Regina, Canada. She has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity, and nation in African and African diasporic screen media. She is author of Contact Zones: Memory, Origin and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema (2008). She is co‐editor of the Directory of World Cinema: Africa (2015). Her current research focuses on transvergent African cinemas, new Maghrebi cinemas, and interpretive strategies for analyzing digital creative cultural practices.

Robin Steedman is an AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellow at the University of Sheffield where she studies data, diversity, and inequality in the creative industries. She recently completed her doctorate in African Languages and Cultures at SOAS University of London. Her doctoral research explores how and why Nairobi‐based female filmmakers can be considered to constitute a film movement and is the first major work on these filmmakers and their unique female‐led industry. She is also currently working on a project examining African documentary film production funds.

Melissa Thackway lectures in African Cinema at Sciences‐Po and at the Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), in Paris. She is also a researcher, freelance documentary filmmaker, and translator. Author of Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Representations in Sub‐Saharan Francophone African Film (James Currey/Indiana University Press/David Philips, 2003), she has published numerous articles and speaks regularly on the subject in international conferences and seminars.

Noah Tsika is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. His books include Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora and Pink 2.0: Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet, and he is the editor of a special issue of Black Camera on the marginalization of African media studies.