Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan film director, producer, and author. She is the co-founder of AFROBUBBLEGUM, a media company that supports, creates and commissions fun, fierce and frivolous African art.

Kahiu is part of the new generation of African storytellers. Her stories and films  have received international acclaim and her films have been screened in numerous film festivals around the world.

To date, Kahiu has written and directed six films. Rafiki is her second feature film.  In 2008, Wanuri completed her first feature film, From A Whisper based on the real life events surrounding the twin bombings of US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. The film won awards at the Africa Movie Academy Awards including Best Director and Best Picture, the Golden Dhow award at Zanzibar International Film Festival and Best Film at Kalasha, Kenya Film and TV awards. Shortly after she completed a documentary about the life of Nobel peace Prize laureate, Wangari Maathai entitled,  For Our Land (2009) for M-Net ‘Great Africans’ Series.

Her short Science Fiction Film, Pumzi (2009) that was partially funded by Focus Features, Goethe Institut and Changa Moto Fund in Kenya, screened at Sundance in 2010. Pumzi won Best Short at Cannes Independent Film Festival, May 2010 and took Silver at Carthage Film
Festival in 2010. The film is featured in the Zeitz MOCAA exhibition, Still here tomorrow to high five you yesterday…

Kahiu was named a TED Fellow in 2017 and World Economic Forum cultural leader in 2018.

She published her first children’s book, The Wooden Camel (Lanata Publishing), she is currently in post production on a feature length documentary,  GER  (To Be Separate) and in pre-production on Rusties, a near future science fiction film set in Nairobi.