Bio

Lotanna is a filmmaker, animator, and archivist based in Chicago. Her work focuses on Nigerian history, politics, and culture. She makes hand-painted, frame-by-frame animation and pairs it with archival research, often in African archives, to tell nonfiction stories in places where photographs and film footage are scarce or missing.

She studied economics at New York University and character animation at Central Saint Martins in London. Her thesis film, What's in a Name, was made with a team of Nigerian painters she taught to animate. It has screened at festivals in Kenya, Canada, Italy, Poland, and the United States, and won Best Short Animation at Decolonizing Frames Festival and Best Student Documentary at the Women's Voices Now Film Festival.

She is the founder and executive director of The War Archive, a nonprofit that collects, digitizes, and shares stories, photographs, and artifacts from the Nigeria-Biafra War. She is currently a Short-Term Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a Chicago Documenter. As a journalist, she has reported for Bloomberg and The Republic.