Yaba Badoe is a documentary filmmaker of dual Ghanaian-British nationality with many years experience making social issue and art documentaries for the main terrestrial channels in Britain. A graduate of King’s College Cambridge, she worked as a civil servant in Ghana before becoming a General Trainee with the BBC. Among her TV credits are: Black and White, a BAFTA nominated four-part documentary series about race and racism in Britain and One To One, a documentary about the life and writing of Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, for BBC4.
In 2010, she set up Fadoa Films, through which she made The Witches of Gambaga, winner of the Best Documentary Award 2010 at the Black International Film Festival in Britain, and 2nd Prize, Documentaries 2011 at FESPACO. In 2014 she completed The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo, a feature-length documentary about the life and work of iconic, African feminist writer, Ama Ata Aidoo and was nominated – alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Lupita Nyong’o – by the Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe for a Distinguished Woman of African Cinema Award.
Her recent documentaries as an independent filmmaker could not have been made without the support of the women’s movement in Ghana and internationally and have been shown to critical acclaim around the world.
Her passion is to document women lives and tell their stories in a way that allows them to speak for themselves. At the same time, she thinks it crucial to situate her subjects in a social and economic context, so that everyone who watches her films begins to understand the gender regimes that shape and constrain women’s lives in Africa.
She aims is to inform, educate and generate empathy in order to change a status quo that often sensationalises and patronises women from non-Western cultures.