While still honing her technical camera skills, Nadia Naomi’s strength is in creative direction and vision, which she brings to every collaborative project. The strength of her films lies in her vision and creative direction. She approaches film as a space for storytelling, world-building, and weaving together research, performance, and community voices.
Her work demonstrates an ability to guide a project from concept to creation, and she welcomes future collaborations with cinematographers, editors, and other artists to bring these visions to life.
An Astrological Diagnosis (2022) an auto-ethnographic experimental film by Nadia Naomi that reimagines Black maternal mental health beyond psychiatry. Blending astrology, altered states, dance, collage, and archival footage, the film reframes mental illness as a portal to resilience, creativity, and deeper ways of knowing.
POSTPARTUM IS FOREVER (2023 – work in progress) is an experimental short film reframing Black maternal mental health as a lifelong journey. Inspired by the phrase coined by Chanel Portia-Albert and grounded in narratives like RowVaughn Wells’ empathic motherhood, the film traces resilience, psychic survival, and transformation, illuminating the enduring realities of Black reproductive life.
Borders of Blackness: Diaspora via the Indian Ocean (2017) is a performative, auto-ethnographic multimedia work that traverses race, ethnicity, and cultural identity through the Tanzanian branch of my multinational family.
Grounded in ethnography and oral history, the film centers the memories and reflections of Nadia’s Punjabi Indian grandmother, interwoven with her own poetic narration as she navigates the layered meanings of Blackness. Through dance and performance, she embodies ancestral and cultural knowledge, exploring how geography, memory, and movement shape a multiplicity of Black diasporic experiences across the Indian Ocean.
Nadia Naomi Mbonde 