ICA | Artists

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Esther Kondo Heller is a poet, writer, and experimental poetry filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet 18/19, Black Obsidian fellow, and Ledbury Critic. They have performed their poetry amongst other places at the Roundhouse, Literary Colloquium Berlin, and the Barbican. She is currently doing an MFA in poetry at Cornell University. Kondo Heller hosts a monthly radio show called Poetic Healing with Zen & Kondo, THFradio Berlin.

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. Her poetry explores the intersectional politics of race, religion, gender, sexuality and migration. She is a current member of Malika's Poetry Kitchen and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She is an alumna of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Her poems have appeared in The White Review, Magma Poetry, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Stand Magazine, and Poetry Wales and anthologised by Bad Betty Press and Anamot Press. She was the Bridport Prize 2021 Young Writer Award recipient, shortlisted for The White Review Poet's Prize 2020 and longlisted for the Rebecca Swift Women Poets’ Prize 2020 and The Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition.

Ebun Sodipo makes work for those who will come after: the black trans people of the future. Her interdisciplinary practice narrates her construction of a black trans-feminine self after slavery and colonialism. Through a process of fragmentation, collage, and fabulation, she devises softer, other-wise ways of imagining and speaking about the body, desire, archives, and the past. Her work has been shown, read, watched, performed at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning Centre, Bernie Grants Arts Centre, Narrative Projects, Raven Row, The Block Museum of Art, South London Gallery, Arcadia Missa’s How To Sleep Faster, Auto Italia, ICA, Tate Britain, Embassy Gallery, Wasafiri, CCA Annex, Camden Arts Centre, Frieze. She was artist in residence at Porthmeor Studios, and Gasworks. She is currently working on commissions for VISUAL Carlow, FACT Liverpool. She also teaches at Falmouth University.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. She is the winner of a 2018 Eric Gregory Award, and has held residencies in the US, Brazil, and the V&A Museum. In 2017 she directed MOTHER TONGUES, an intergenerational poetry translation and film project exploring the indigenous language heritages of black poets. She is currently a Techne-funded doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, and her debut poetry collection Quiet is forthcoming from Faber in June 2022.

Olivia Douglass is a British-Nigerian writer and poet. They are the author of Slow Tongue (2018), a verse/lyric-essay hybrid that responds to M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks. Their writing appears in publications including Bath Magg, Nothing Personal, Prototype 2, and they wrote the foreword for Away With Word vol.4. A Barbican Young Poets Alumna, Douglass has been commissioned by the National Poetry Library (London) and Galleria Duarte Sequeira in (Portugal), alongside curating reading rooms for Passa Porta Festival (Brussels) and Nottingham Contemporary. They have held residencies with Talawa Theatre Company and Theatre Peckham, been shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poet Prize 2020, and in 2021 was longlisted for a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. Douglass’s writing is concerned with articulating alternative visions of liberated Black queer experiences, away from colonial frameworks. They are currently working on a debut poetry collection.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a Tobago-born unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto, where she practised law for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989); the speculative prose poem Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991); the young adult novel Harriet’s Daughter (1988); the play Coups and Calypsos; and four collections of essays, including her collection BlanK (2017). Her book-length poem Zong! is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Zong! was named the 2021 winner of World Literature Today’s 21 Books for the 21st Century.

Among her awards are numerous Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council grants, including the prestigious Chalmers Award (Ontario Arts Council) and the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (outstanding mid-career artist), as well as the Pushcart Prize (USA), the Casa de las Américas Prize (Cuba), the Lawrence Foundation Prize (USA), the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award and Dora Award finalist (Drama). Her fellowships include Guggenheim, McDowell and Rockefeller (Bellagio). She is an awardee of both the YWCA Women of Distinction Awards (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Society Rebels for a Cause Awards. She has been Writer-in-Residence at several universities and a guest at writers' retreats. M. NourbeSe Philip is the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the 2021 recipient of the Molson Prize, the Canada Council for the Arts’ lifetime achievement award, for her ‘invaluable contributions to literature’