Rejoice Abutsa

Biography

Rejoice Abutsa is a Creative Scholar and a doctoral student in Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. In 2019, she was awarded the Chevening Scholarship to pursue a Masters in Arts degree in Creative and Collaborative Enterprise at the University College London (UCL). There, she explored questions of film and media representation, including the complexities involved in the transnational distribution of neo-Nollywood. At UCL, alongside leading neo-Nollywood film scholar, Dr Samantha Iwowo, Rejoice co-convened a roundtable titled ‘Towards a Sustainable Framework for Transnational Neo-Nollywood”. Her industrial achievements in film include leading the development and expansion of Nollywood’s largest job-peering platform, Auditions.ng. Through this platform she served as a story development, casting or promotional consultant for several productions including Lost Café (2017); Light in the Dark (2019); Living in Bondage Breaking Free (2019), and One Lagos Night (2020). Some of these films are currently available on Netflix. Rejoice is also the writer and/or producer of the Chibok-advocacy project, CaptiV Dream (2020) and Victim (2016). She is founder and organizer of the digital platform Peeroes, a curatorship practice that connects young scholars to document unwritten practices in Nigerian filmmaking.