Photo: Sonya Renee Taylor, Sandra Zvenyika, and Estelle Chout for Po’ Boys and Oysters.

On Saturday 22 November, Auckland came alive with colour as the first-ever Aotearoa Festival of Black Arts (AFoBA) launched. The month-long celebration of Afro-Kiwi excellence promises to reshape Aotearoa's creative landscape. Spanning venues from the Herald Theatre in Aotea Square to the Auckland Art Gallery, The Tuning Fork, Capital Cinema, and Ellen Melville Centre, the festival marks a historic moment. It is the first time Black creativity across theatre, music, literature, film, wellness, and visual arts has been platformed at this scale in New Zealand. Leading the team behind it is Dione Joseph, Festival Director and Artistic Director and Founder of Black Creatives Aotearoa (BCA). This community-driven organisation has spent seven years nurturing artists of African and Afro-diasporic heritage across Aotearoa. 

“The Aotearoa Festival of Black Arts was a concept I developed 18 months ago,” says Joseph. “However, I’ve been dreaming about a festival that centred our people’s voices, voices from the African diaspora in Aotearoa for ten years.” The inspiration traces back to 2014, when Joseph attended the Edinburgh Festival. The energy and sense of shared purpose left an indelible mark. “It was such an incredible experience with shows, community, and connection, and I wanted to bring that magic home,” she recalls. When Joseph founded Black Creatives Aotearoa in 2018, she saw the beginnings of that dream taking form. Over the years, BCA produced theatre, visual art showcases, and workshops that connected to the growing Afro-Kiwi creative community. Still, one thing was missing: a festival that could bring it all together. “That’s what this festival is about, centring Black joy, inviting audiences to connect with our community, and creating a space for our artists to shine in mainstream venues,” Joseph explains. 

AFoBA is happening in 2025, Joseph says, because the need could no longer be ignored. “Our screenwriters want places to show their films. Our playwrights want their work on the main stages. Our visual artists want to engage in critical conversations about art. Our poets and creatives want to explore Afrofuturism and speculative fiction. We deserve those spaces,” she says firmly. While there have been Afrocentric events centering music, food, and traditional cultures before, none have encompassed the breadth of contemporary Black creativity that AFoBA does. The festival programme spans genres and generations, blending performance, artworks, community wellness, and technology. 

While the global rise of movements that celebrate Black excellence provides context, AFoBA is distinctly local. “With the exception of our two international artists, everyone in the festival is from Aotearoa from Matakana to the Kapiti Coast,” Joseph notes. “We’re showcasing that brilliant quality work is right here, made by Afro-Kiwis, for everyone.” There are over 50 local artists including filmmakers Imani-J and Jennifer Onyeiwu, musician Jujulipps, healer and bodyworker Sharl Fynn, dancer Celeste Botha, and visual artist Kainee Simone. The international guests, Sonya Renee Taylor, a celebrated poet and activist, and Junauda Petrus, Poet Laureate of Minneapolis, will be running a workshop series aimed at local BIPOC creatives to explore speculative worlds, experiment with form, and seed new work, possibly for the AFoBA in 2027.

For Joseph, this festival is more than an event; it’s the beginning of a legacy. Over the past year and a half, she’s led a small team of producers, artists, and organisers through what she describes as a “joyful but intense” process. “The reality of putting on a festival involves a lot of administration, logistics, and time management,” she says, laughing. “But I’ve been blessed with an incredible team.” The core group involves producer Ahilan Karunaharan, marketing lead Nathan Bunch, and six event producers overseeing everything, including theatre and carnivals. Together, they’ve raised $125,000, with $50,000 still to go. “It’s a huge investment in the future,” Joseph says. “Artists deserve to be paid well, and we wanted to do this properly with beautiful branding, strong marketing, and incredible production quality. This is an invitation: be part of the beginning of our story.” 

The festival’s opening night featured Po’ Boys and Oysters, a family comedy written by Caribbean playwright Estelle Chout and directed by Joseph herself. Joseph calls it the festival’s “goddess show.” “It’s about a Black queer couple in Mission Bay trying to adopt a child and telling their family about it over dinner,” she says. “It’s funny, loud, honest, and full of love. It’s not about trauma, it’s about family and joy.” Also on the programme is Jingle Beats, an Afro-twist on Christmas songs led by musical director Gabriel Mugadza; a wellness carnival called “Nyege” (Swahili for “to move”), featuring yoga, African tango, and somatic body practices; and film screenings of 12 Afro-Kiwi stories at the Capital Cinema. The festival even ventures into technology-driven artmaking, with one production 3D-printing a ceramic prop that can break and reassemble through magnetic structures. “It’s innovation and sustainability working hand in hand,” says Joseph. “That’s what Black creativity looks like, bold, inventive and future-facing.” 

One of AFoBA’s most defining principles is its utter rejection of trauma as the only lens for Black storytelling. “I’m not into poverty or trauma porn,” Joseph says. “There’s space for those stories, but that’s not what we make at BCA. Our kaupapa is to connect, create, and collaborate – to centre Black joy, abundance, and innovation.” Joseph’s approach is deeply relational. “I’m a mother, an artist, a director, but most importantly, I’m in a relationship with my family, my cast, my community, my ancestors. I believe my purpose is to create and hold space for our communities to thrive.” 

Beyond the performances, AFoBA aims to have a long-lasting impact. “Our design and impact specialist has ensured that everything we do is intentional,” Joseph says. “We’re asking what our artists want to gain: skills, industry experience, connection? We track where they start and where they grow.” This story, Joseph hopes, will continue well beyond 2025. Plans are already in motion for AFoBA to become a biennial event, potentially touring to Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin. “This is just the start,” she says. “We hope people will support us so we can keep growing, bringing more art to life, and showing that Black creativity is not marginal. It’s integral to the story of Aotearoa.”

At its heart, the Aotearoa Festival of Black Arts is declaring that Afro-Kiwis are here, shaping the country’s creative future. “This is an Afro event for all communities; tangata whenua, tangata Pasifika, all our diverse ethnic communities and of course our Pākeha allies,,” says Joseph. “We want people to come, connect with the rhythms of our hearts, the drumbeats of our souls, and see that we are proud to be part of Aotearoa’s evolving story.” The festival’s guiding principle is respect for heritage, the land, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. “For BCA and AFoBA, we will always hold that we are on Indigenous land. We honour that privilege every time we make art,” Joseph says. 

With music, movement, and creativity at its core, AFoBA is more than a festival – it’s a movement grounded in joy, rooted in history, and looking boldly toward the future.

Tunmise Adebowale is a Nigerian-born New Zealander based in Ōtepoti. She is an award-winning poet and short story writer with work published in Landfall, The Big Idea, Arts Maker Aotearoa, The Spinoff, takahē, Pantograph Punch, Turbine-Kapohau, Newsroom, NZ Poetry Shelf and Verb Wellington.