NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Lovia Gyarkye
Editor
Lovia Gyarkye is an editor at Hammer & Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture. Previously, she was a critic at The Hollywood Reporter and, before that, an editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, and Aperture. In 2025, Lovia was named a finalist for Best Film Critic by the Los Angeles Press Club, and in 2024, she won an ASME Next Award for Journalists Under 30. Lovia teaches in the arts and culture program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and is a contributing editor at Africa Is a Country. She lives in New York City.
Events featuring
this guest
Sunday Sept. 20 2026 • 4:00 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Literature into Cinema: Arie and Chuko Esiri on Adapting Mrs Dalloway
Arie Esiri · Chuko Esiri · moderated by Lovia Gyarkye
A 90-minute conversation-led craft talk using Clarissa, Arie and Chuko Esiri’s reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in contemporary Lagos, as a case study in literary adaptation. The brothers will discuss how interiority becomes image and sound, how character and structure change across forms, what can be carried from a novel into cinema, what must be invented anew, and what happens when a story is translated across time, geography, culture, and medium. The session moves through screenwriting, directing, collaboration, performance, and visual language before opening into an extended audience Q&A.