Dominic Yarabe named 2026-27 FSC-LEF Fellow
We are delighted to join the LEF Foundation in announcing that Dominic Yarabe has been selected as the 2026-27 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship. Yarabe’s feature-length film, Feu de Lune (working title), explores West African tales and the palimpsests of wartime. Filmed in Bobia, a rural village in Côte d’Ivoire, where history lives through stories, the memory of this largely erased civil war survives through children’s dreams, adult silences, and a mother’s nightly bedtime stories. The film traces tensions between ephemera and archive, visibility and opacity, examining storytelling itself as a practice through which knowledge is re-membered, regenerated, and performed by those who inherit its consequences.
Dominic Yarabe is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. Yarabe’s practice focuses on creating nonlinear, fractured films that refract rather than reflect; that visualize unconscious ways of seeing and experiencing; that traverse the complexities of the immigrant and black experience; and that find intersections between digital art and cultural commentary. Her work is informed by her research in black visual culture, particularly the ways in which image-making might subvert the colonial gaze both in real-time and through its long-term effects within modern forms of digital media.
Her films have screened at Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, True/False Film Fest, and other festivals, museums and cultural institutions internationally. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a Duke Center for Documentary Studies DocX Residency Fellow.
Yarabe received her MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University and is currently a PhD candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
The FSC-LEF Fellowship is awarded annually to one Boston-area nonfiction filmmaker not currently affiliated with Harvard. The filmmaker receives a $15,000 grant (funded by the LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in Harvard FSC work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities.
We look forward to welcoming Dominic into the FSC community for the academic year 2026-27!