The Collective is a production hub for culture. We produce music, films, oral stories and histories that stand at the Black/African and Iranian intersections, in an artistic effort to fight racial erasure and be the culture.
The Collective started from the stories 8 year-old Priscillia used to tell herself- pained by the silences around her experiences as a little black Iranian girl in Iran. Decades later and she reached out to different black Iranians, Iranians of African descent and other Iranians, and asked them if they’d like to join her on the Collective for Black Iranians. In 2020, the Collective was born and focused mainly on breaking the silences and educating. Today, the Collective is working on sustaining productions of culture, through music, art and film.
Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda
Founder x Creative Director x Producer
Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is a black Iranian Cape Town-based filmmaker (Where My Memory Began, We Will Be Who We Are), founder and creative director at the Collective for Black Iranians and co-founder and advisory board member of House of Salone, a production and creative agency that advises on critically conscious storytelling. A recovering human rights lawyer, Priscillia has worked with the UN in war affected countries negotiating the release of child soldiers in armed groups and implementing reintegration programming.
Priscillia’s experience with storytelling and filmmaking expanded into the founding of the Collective for Black Iranians (2020) where she has directed and produced a slate of micro films and documentaries centering Black Iranian narratives in Iran and its diaspora. Her work as a storyteller has been written about in multiple outlets, BBC World, BBC Persian, AlJazeera, AJ+, Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality, France24, etc.
Priscillia’s visual storytelling is grounded in ancestral memory, intersectionality and Blackness to lyrically bear witness to Black life in its varied diasporic iterations. Her first short film, Where My Memory Began has been selected in prestigious film festivals (HotDocs, NYAFF, PAFF, Aspen Shortsfest) and her latest short film, We Will Be Who We Are, is currently in the festival circuit. Priscillia has been working on her first feature documentary, The Queens of Freetown, searching for FannyAnn, for over a year.
A product of a childhood spent being the only Black Iranian girl she ever saw in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, to staring up at the tall buildings in French projects, Priscillia has spent most of her life observing mainstream society from the margins. Her ideas and creative vision were born out of those margins.
Priscillia is currently a PhD candidate at Cape Town University with the departments of African Feminist Studies and Fine Arts. She holds dual International Law and Business degrees from Sorbonne Law, ESSEC Business School, NYU Law and is a USC Film school drop-out.
Her work has been featured in BBC World, AlJazeera, France 24, BBC and more.
Priscillia lives in Cape Town where she balances her filmmaking, research, the Collective for Black Iranians with productions and narrative consulting for the UN. She is a 2024 Atlantic Fellow on Racial Equity and a United Nations 2020 Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD 2020).
Alex Eskandarkhah
Co-founder
Alex Eskandarkhah is a filmmaker, entrepreneur, public speaker and talk show host. He makes up one-half of the Gifted Gab, a media company centered on dialogue, storytelling and personal development. Alex is also the founder, writer/director and executive producer of Gamble Ave Filmworks, a production company specializing in underrepresented stories from shorts to features. In addition to that, he is a small business owner and operations director of several ventures, including Afro Era and Esfahan Persian Rugs. Alex was born to Iranian parents in Toronto, Ontario where he grew up and currently resides in Edmonton, Alberta. He graduated from York University in 2019, where he earned his bachelor's degree in Sociology. Alex has recently completed his broadcast TV hour directorial debut documentary project titled “Coaching While Black”.
Collaborators
Past x Present
Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Historian (2020 - 2022)
Chyna Dumas
Artist
Ebrahim Albo
Storyteller
Homayoun Fiamor
Co-founder (2020 - 2022)
Kimia Fatehi
Artist
Mateo Askaripour
Storyteller
Maya June Mansour
Storyteller
Mina M. Jafari
Artist
Morehshin Allahyari
Artist
Norman Soltani
Co-founder (2020 - 2022)
Pardis Nkoy
Co-founder (2020 - 2022)
Parisa Nkoy
Co-founder (2020 - 2022)
Pegah Bahadori
Storyteller
Sahar Ghorishi
Artist
Sarah Farajzadeh
Storyteller