Estrella Sendra is a researcher, filmmaker and festival organiser, working as Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries Education (Festivals and Events) at King’s College London. Prior to this role, she was working as Lecturer in Global Media Industries, at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, since 2018 and as Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at SOAS, University of London since 2019. This video essay was made for pedagogic purposes at SOAS, University of London. Estrella has published in the fields of festivals, African film and screen media, migration, rooted cosmopolitanism and gender. Since 2011, when she directed Témoignages de l’autre côté / Testimonials from the other side, an awarded documentary about migration, she has been developing a regional expertise in Senegal. In 2018, she was awarded a PhD from SOAS, whose thesis was entitled ‘Two-tier festivals in Senegal between the local and the international: A Case Study of the Festival International de Folklore et de Percussion in Louga (Senegal).’ She is Associate Editor in Screenworks: the peer-reviewed online publication of practice research in screen media, and the co-author of the ‘Introductory Guide to Video Essays’ published in Learning on Screen (2020) and author of ‘Video Essays: Curating and Transforming Film Education through Artistic Research’ (2020). She is also an Editorial Board Member in the Journal of African Media Studies. She is an Advisory Board member of Screen the ERC-funded research project ‘Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies’, led by Prof Lindiwe Dovey, and of the Royal African Society festival Film Africa in London, She was the director of the Cambridge African Film Festival in 2014 and 2015, and has been involved in further festivals in Senegal, Spain, South Africa and the UK.
