Kordae J Henry

Kordae Jatafa Henry is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and visual artist. The core of his practice stems from a multidisciplinary background, having earned a dual Master of Architecture/Landscape Architecture from University of Pennsylvania School of Design in 2015, as well as a Master of Arts in SCI-Arc’s postgraduate Fiction and Entertainment program in 2018. His release of his 2019 short music film Earth Mother, Sky Father has led him to take the stage at the 2019 Design Indaba Conference, become a recent nominee for the shots 2020 Awards’ New Director of the Year, and exhibit his work in museums and festivals all over the world.

Through live-action music films, installations, dance, game engine environments, and mythology, Henry’s work invites new ways of seeing humans, folklore, mysticism, pop culture, post-genre music, labor, and creation stories as tools to explore the radical imagination. Most recently, Henry has worked with Sundance New Frontier Lab and ONX Studio to reconstruct a real-time performance exploring the past, present, and future of the Black body through ceremony. He is currently a Visual Studies faculty at SCI-Arc.

Work Title: Earth Mother, Sky Father, 2024

Medium: Text-to-Video (Sora by Open AI)

Work Description

For the Strada exhibition, the film 'Earth Mother, Sky Father' opens with a prologue featuring Sora, a virtual observer, who narrates the profound human impacts on Earth. This introduction sets the stage for a narrative where Afrika reclaims its natural resources, merging traditional rites with the emerging prosperity of its indigenous peoples. Utilizing OpenAI’s Sora to depict scenes of the Anthropocene, the film provides the director’s insights into sovereignty, environmental justice, and cultural renewal, fostering a dialogue between technology and tradition.