Asmaa Jama is a Somali multidisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker based in Bristol, UK. Their work is interested in myth, movement and migration. Asmaa's first film work Before We Disappear (2021), was an interactive moving image piece commissioned by BBC Arts, followed by The Season of Burning Things (2021), in collaboration with Gouled Ahmed, commissioned by the Bristol Old Vic (2021) and Except this time nothing returns from the ashes (2022), commissioned by Spike Island. Their work has also been presented at the 18th and 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in collaboration with Huda Tayob’s Index of Edges (2023) and the Goethe Institute and Theatre Neumarkt’s 100 Ways to Say We (2021), and was the official selection at Blackstar Film Festival, Aesthetica Film Festival, Sharjah Film Platform 5 (2022) and the New Cinema Awards at Berwick Film Festival (2024).
Jama is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and Access x Art Prize, and commended by the Brunel African Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Wasafiri Writing Prize, James Berry Prize, New Poets Prize and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. In theatre, they have written for, and are performing in, Dorothee Munyaneza’s Mailles, and have written for Radouan Mrziga’s Akal and Libya.