Sada Malumfashi

Sada Malumfashi is a writer and cultural curator from Nigeria. He is the Founder of Open Arts, a literary and arts collective where he curates the Hausa International Book and Arts Festival (HIBAF), a crisscross festival of arts and language by and for African creatives in an indigenous language. The festival showcases the best of contemporary African literature, poetry, music, art, film, and theatre in Hausa language. His fiction has appeared in Lolwe, Bakwa Magazine, Transition Magazine and New Orleans Review. He is an alumni of the European Union’s Global Cultural Relations Program (GCRP) where he co-founded RIMA, a platform that empowers emerging creative practitioners from the global south by connecting them with international opportunities for funding and mobility. He is a 2022 arts curator resident at the Al-Balad Arts Residency in the historical district of Jeddah “Al Balad,” a UNESCO World Heritage Site; a 2019 fellow of Reporters Without Borders Germany; 2019 fellow of Arts Omi Residency; and 2018 fellow of the Goethe-Institute/Sylt Foundation African Residency in Germany.

He was selected to participate in the 2019 International Colloquium “Culture for the Future – Creativity, Innovation and Dialogue for Inclusive Development” organised by the European Commission. He has produced video documentaries exploring identity of cultural and artistic producers of Hausa diaspora across the world. He is interested in the nexus of culture and identity on the African continent. His works have explored the Hausa feminist writings. Writing for Asymptote, winners of the 2015 London Book Fair's International Literary Translation Initiative Award, and the premier site for world literature in translation, he has investigated how censorship, religion and conservatism affect the representation of queer lives and relationships in Hausa literature inflected and influenced by local conditions and cultural nuances.