Adetoun Küppers-Adebisi
Engineer, Author, Curator, Publicist and Lecturer for Black German Literatures, Culture and Media, MINT Ambassador and Diversity Coordinator for Civil Society and Berlin Administration
With her doctoral thesis from a gender and anti-racist perspective she plans post- and de-colonial paradigm shifts in the categories of waste management, neo-colonialism and nation. She has lectured at universities in Fulda and Goettingen, Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin.
As president of AFROTAK TV / cyberNomads and national board member of The African Network Germany TANG she realizes concepts for black and diasporic knowledge productions (educational archive, multimedia lab, online platform). She was German speaker for the African Union in Paris and the UN Decade for People of African Descent in Geneva.
As project coordinator she fills gaps not covered by the mainstream: Black Berlin Biennale For Contemporary Art and Discourse, DOCUMENTA Africana Germanica, Black Media Congress, Landesaktionsplan gegen Rassismus und ethnische Diskriminierung, DaMigra / Feminist Migrants Umbrella Organisation.
As elected citizen's deputy she initiates cultural-political inclusion, lobbies and cooperates with institutions such as the House of the Cultures of the World HKW, Goethe Institut, the Federal Agency for Civic Education of the German Government BPB, as well as foundations Heinrich Böll, Friedrich Ebert, and Konrad Adenauer.
In 2004, UNESCO launched the literature prize May Ayim Award that she initiated to commemorate the en-slave-ment trade and its abolition. In 2010, 2013, and 2017 Black Heritage Magazine acknowledged her as one of the most important Afro-Germans. The Berlin Senate, German Federal Government, and European Union have repeatedly honoured her innovative approaches and civil society interventions. In 2024, she was ZDF Heute's one of four women to have shaped how black people are perceived in Germany.
Michael Küppers-Adebisi
Author, Curator, Publicist, Cultural Manager
Studied art under Nan Hoover and Nam June Paik at the Academy of Fine Arts Duesseldorf. As cultural manager he realized The CoffeeShop (1992 - 2000) as the 1st Black German Culture Salon. Since 2001 he has been implementing AFROTAK TV / cyberNomads concepts for black and diasporic knowledge production and culture of remembrance (educational archive, multimedia laboratory, online platform).
With the Black Media Congress he brought international Black Best Practice Projects to Berlin in cooperation with the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Goethe Institute (2002), Heinrich Böll Foundation (2003), HKW (2004). In 2004, UNESCO Germany endorsed the May Ayim Award, a literary prize he initiated to commemorate the en-slave-ment trade and its abolition. With Black Berlin Biennale For Contemporary Art and Discourse and Documenta Africana Germanica (2016) he has developed two official projects for the UN Decade for People of African Descent.
He has represented the Federal Republic of Germany as the first Afro-German poet at the Goethe Institute organised German Nuorican Poetry Festival (NYC, 1996). His artistic works have been exhibited among others at HKW (Berlin, 2013), Villa Romana (Florence, 2015), Goethe Institut South Africa (Johannesburg, 2016), and the Gorki Theater Herbst Salon (Berlin, 2017). In 2017, Transcript Verlag published his de-colonial performance and theatre play Der Reichstag - Kafka in the reMix as part of an anthology of migrant-diasporic contemporary works.
The EU, Berlin Senate, and German Federal Government have repeatedly honoured his innovative civil society interventions. At the end of 2017, he was chairman of the board for Berlin Global Village. Black Heritage Magazine has on several occasions honored him as one of the most important Afro-Germans (2006, 2014, 2017).