The Shape of Memory

Tamara Shogaolu is an interdisciplinary artist, director, and creative technologist. She is devoted to telling the rich, urgent stories of people who have faced erasure, marginalization, and oppression. As a Black Latinx woman working in fields historically shaped by colonialism and racism, she strives to create space for people like her on screen, in museums, and in the future of storytelling.

Born in the U.S. and raised in Panama, Shogaolu spent her childhood in Latin America and her formative years in the U.S., Egypt, South Africa, and Indonesia. Living between cultures, and learning to speak five languages, she learned how sharing personal stories can educate, heal, and unite. These early experiences inspired her to discover new ways to tell them by pushing the

boundaries of traditional storytelling. Through mediums as distinct as virtual reality, sculpture, installation art, textiles, and puppetry, she has brought forward the stories of Afro Ecuadorians, Indonesian Transgender women, LGBTQ+ migrants from the Middle East, and indigenous astronomers, collaborating with creators of color from around the world.

Shogaolu’s award-winning work has been showcased at festivals, museums, and platforms such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Tribeca Immersive, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the Open City Documentary Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Amsterdam Museum, the National Gallery of Indonesia, the Arab American Museum, and others. She has partnered with institutions including the Sundance Institute, Netflix, PBS Frontline, and the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF). She has also given invited talks at Harvard, Leiden University, MIT, Vrij Universitat Amsterdam, and Yale.

Shogaolu was a 2018 Sundance Institute New Frontier Lab Programs Fellow, a 2019 Gouden Kalf Nominee, a 2020 Creative Capital Award Recipient, and a 2020 Sundance New Frontier John D. a MIT Open DocLab Fellow, and aband Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Grantee. She was a Burton Lewis Endowed Scholar in Directing at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she graduated with an MFA. Shogaolu was also a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, a Luce Scholar in Indonesia.

As the founder and creative director of Ado Ato Pictures, Shogaolu is the first Black Latinx woman to lead a major studio focused on animation and technology.