In Conversation with John Akomfrah and Sherrilyn Ifill

A powerful and timely conversation between artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah and Sherrilyn Ifill, civil rights lawyer and founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy at the Howard University School of Law.

Akomfrah’s newly created multichannel film installation, which brings together multiple perspectives of young activists during the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s to raise issues related to memory and social change, debuts at the Baltimore Museum of Art November 16, 2025, through February 1, 2026.

Akomfrah and Ifill will delve into the artistic and political dimensions of the work and examine how film can bear witness to the past while speaking urgently to the present and our shifting cultural landscape.

This event will include ASL interpretation and live captioning by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services. The auditorium is wheelchair accessible and assistive listening devices are available. Please see Accessibility at the BMA for additional resources to support your visit.

Tickets

Free. Online registration is now sold out. Limited walk-up seating may be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Schedule

2:30 p.m. – Doors
3 p.m. – Conversation
4 p.m. – Program ends

About the Speakers

John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah founded with artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul the influential Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1998) and made his directorial debut with Handsworth Songs (1986), which addressed the fallout from the riots that took place in the Handsworth district of Birmingham and London in 1985. Lawson and Gopaul remain his collaborators today, alongside Ashitey Akomfrah, as Smoking Dogs Films (1998–present). John Akomfrah’s work has been shown in museums and exhibitions around the world, and his films have garnered multiple awards. He received the Artes Mundi Prize in 2017 and a Knighthood for services to the Arts in the 2023 New Year Honours. The BMA honored him in 2024 as an Artist Who Inspires. As The Guardian put it, Akomfrah “has secured a reputation as one of the U.K.’s most pioneering filmmakers [whose] poetic works have grappled with race, identity, and postcolonial attitudes for over three decades.”

Sherrilyn Ifill

Sherrilyn Ifill is the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University School of Law and a leading voice in the nation’s ongoing conversation about civil rights. Prior to this appointment, she served as the seventh president & director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. Ifill is a recipient of the Radcliffe Medal, the Brandeis Medal, the Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, and the Gold Medal from the New York State Bar Association. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. In 2021, TIME magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is also the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates. Ifill received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Vassar College, and a J.D. from New York University School of Law. Following law school, she served as a Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York and served for five years as an Assistant Counsel litigating voting rights cases at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She taught at the University of Maryland School of Law for several years beginning in 1993, and served as Distinguished Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School in fall 2023. Ifill is also a scholar in residence at the Museum of Modern Art. Her new book about race and the current democratic crisis in the United States entitled “Is This America?” will be released by Penguin Press in 2024.

Images: John Akomfrah. Portrait, 2024 © Smoking Dogs Films; Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films. Photography by Christian Cassiel

Sherrilyn Ifill. Courtesy of TinaLeuFotos