About

 

Image credit: Kate Peters

Justina Kehinde is a writer, actor and director, interested in the stories we don’t tell.

As an actor she recently portrayed Marianne in the Olivier and Tony Award winning production of Connor McPherson’s Girl From the North Country (UK and Ireland Tour), and featured in the hit Netflix series SANDMAN. Other credits include Best of Enemies (Young Vic), Holby City (BBC), NHS The Musical (Theatre Royal Plymouth) and Passengers (Adelaide Fringe Festival).

Her directorial debut Til Death Do Us Part (Theatre 503) won Best New Production at the 2022 London Pub Theatre Awards. In 2023 she assisted Rebecca Frecknall on her 5* production of Romeo and Juliet (Almeida Theatre). Selected credits include: UMUADA (Bunker Theatre, King’s Head Theatre), For the Culture; Sweet Tamarind (Tamasha Theatre Company), as assistant,The Sun The Moon and the Stars, (dir. Nadia Fall, Theatre Royal Stratford East).

An alumna of the Soho Writer’s Lab (2021-2022), Royal Court Writer’s Group (2019) and BBC London Voices (2020), her debut radio play ‘Red Tide’ was commissioned by the Southwark Playhouse (2020). She has also worked with several production companies on thought-form short films and is developing several TV projects.

In 2021 she collaborated with the UNFPA on an original poem raising awareness around Harmful Traditional Practices, and in 2019 was commissioned to perform a poem as an opener for Prof. Angela Davis’ keynote speech at the inaugural, international conference on #METOO in Reykjavik. Her TEDx Poem ‘Write Your own story: Grandmother’s Hands’ interrogates the British Education System’s omission of colonilalism and imperialism from its curriculum. She won the Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Prize in 2012 and was a runner-up in the 2014 Hammer & Tongue National Finals.

A graduate of the University of Cambridge, her artistry continues to be informed by the work of Black Feminists and post-colonial theorists and seeks to be a contribution to the role art plays in the work of social justice and liberation.