Programmed by Gallatin MA Candidate Eliel Peterson, join NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture for a screening of the 2008 Nollywood film Caught in the Act, directed by Charles Inojie and co-presented by Nolly Babes. The film follows separated twin sisters, played by Genevieve Nnaji, whose lives collide as one sister deals with an abusive mother-in-law, and the other, a life of crime.

The screening will be followed by a conversation featuring Venessa Appiah, Jediael Peterson, and Baaba Annan, current doctoral scholars whose work engages questions of gender, identity, and visual culture. Together, the panelists will consider how Nollywood has represented women’s desire and agency, the cultural expectations attached to the figure of the “good woman,” and the ways African filmmakers use popular cinema to negotiate, and challenge, ideas of respectability, womanhood, and gendered life across African contexts.

The evening will open with remarks by Nolly Babes

Afi Venessa Appiah is a theorist, editor, and publisher specializing in African Studies, Film Studies, and Visual Culture. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch and holds a Master of Arts in Film Studies with a specialization in African Studies, as well as a double Bachelor of Arts in both disciplines. Her contemplative approach seeks objective significance in the realms of the intangible, the complex, and the taboo.

Eliel Peterson is a writer, curator, and community arts organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a master’s candidate at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, concentrating in Black visual culture with a specific focus on African cinema. Eliel’s primary research investigates visual language emerging from continental Africa and its diasporas, exploring how cinema circulates culture and how identities are constructed and thus performed through visual language. As a freelance film critic, her writing has been published in Africa Is a Country and Document Journal. Eliel is the founder of The Eye Level Project, a free arts initiative for NYC youth that engages young artists of color in photography as a tool for personal, political, and social memory.

Ewuraba (Baaba) was born and raised in New York City with a family from Ghana, West Africa. As a second-generation American, she values education, community, social justice, and activism. Baaba takes pride in her work being collaborative, impactful, and fulfilling. Baaba is a PhD student in Sociology at Stony Brook University. Her educational background is in Human Rights and Development with graduate and undergraduate degrees from Binghamton University. Baaba combines her passion for accessible education and youth in her professional work, from substitute teaching to higher education admissions counseling, and other forms of youth advocacy and development. In addition to education, Baaba has strong interest in sustainability and her primary research focus is what liberation looks like across the African diaspora. 

Jediael Peterson is a history doctoral candidate at Stonybrook University, where she studies oil pollution and ethnic minority protest in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. She was recently named a 2026-2027 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow, which will support the completion of her dissertation project, tentatively titled “The Rivers Are Dying: Naked Protest and Ecological Alienation in the Niger Delta.” Her research examines how women, particularly elderly women in the region, respond to environmental degradation and extractive economies. She also works as a historical consultant at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) for an upcoming exhibition and serves as a program coordinator for The Eye Level project, a Brooklyn based arts nonprofit servicing NYC teenagers.