Keren Lasme Mentorship Awards recipient

Keren Lasme is an artist, writer, literary curator and researcher based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. As an aesthete and a storyteller, Keren uses art to explore the self and communicate her inner landscapes. She reclaims the dreamscape and shares fragments of wonder, beauty and mystery through photography, installations, writing, performances, co-learning practices and more. Keren is interested in mythopoetic identity formation, mythmaking, knowledge activation and the use of storytelling, books, self-study and collective study as tools to expand our sense of possibilities in all directions for the purpose of world-bending, world-mending and world-making. She also uses alternative spaces for collective (un)/(re)learning as dreamscapes and playgrounds to negotiate freedom, healing, revelation, remembrance and the reconfiguration of social imaginaries. Her research practice draws on Black feminist pedagogies while using the collective memories and imagination archived in African literatures as praxis. Keren holds a degree in African Studies from SOAS University of London with a major in African Philosophy. She is also a 2021 Prince Claus Seed Awardee and a Fellow of T:>Works Per°Form Open Academy.