Jim Chuchu

Jim Chuchu is a filmmaker, musician and visual artist living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. His debut short film premiered at the 2013 Durban Film Festival, followed by an international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the same year. Chuchu’s photographs debuted in the 2014 at the “Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media surrounding African Queerness at RAW Material Company as part of Dak’Art 2014.

In 2014, Chuchu co-founded The Nest Collective—a multidisciplinary art collective based in Nairobi, Kenya that has created works in film, music, fashion, visual arts and literature such as the critically-acclaimed queer anthology film Stories of Our Lives, which was banned in Kenya for ‘promoting homosexuality’. Despite the ongoing ban in the country, the film has so far screened in over 80 countries and won numerous awards such as the Jury Prize at the 2015 Berlinale Teddy Awards.

His films have since screened at the MoMA, the Toronto, Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals, and his works have exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Guggenheim Bilbao, the Vitra Design Museum. His 2015 Invocations series was the basis of a solo show—Jim Chuchu’s Invocations—at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, where they now form part of the museum’s collection.

Chuchu co-founded HEVA in 2015, an East African creative business fund based in Kenya that invests in the creative economy sector in the East African region. Since its inception, HEVA has invested more than $3 million in the East African creative economy sector, innovated financial models specifically for the region, created networking, exchange and training opportunities for young entrepreneurs and pushed for policy and legal reforms to improve the sector.

Chuchu is currently serving as co-founding director of the Nest Collective–where current projects include an ongoing partnership in the International Inventories Programme, an international research and database project that has so far catalogued an inventory of 30,000 Kenyan cultural objects held in museums and public institutions across the globe–and HEVA, where he thinks through intervention strategies and future outlooks for the fund in his capacity as co-founding partner.