Ephraim Asili
Ephraim Asili is an African American multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates films, books, cassettes, records, collage, and installation works that situate themselves as a series of meditations on the everyday in relation to local and global politics.
At Radcliffe, Asili is completing his second feature-length 16mm film Don & Moki: Organic Music Society, a documentary/essay hybrid exploring the life and times of the multi-instrumentalist, theorist, and educator Don Cherry and his collaborator and wife, the visual artist Moki Cherry.
Asili’s work has been exhibited in festivals and venues all over the world, including the Berlinale and the New York Film Festival, and his feature debut The Inheritance premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival and is part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Asili received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021 and a Ford Foundation JustFilms grant in 2022. His most recent work was commissioned during the summer of 2022, the direction of a short film prelude, Strange Math, and the live stream photography for the Louis Vuitton Men’s Studio spring-summer 2023 fashion show, an homage to the menswear line’s late artistic director Virgil Abloh. Asili earned his BA at Temple University and his MFA at Bard College. Asili is currently the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, where he is also an associate professor.
