Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist and writer whose works critically examine memory, trauma, gender, racism and post-colonialism.

[2] Grada Kilomba was born in Lisbon and is of West African descent (São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola).

Grada Kilomba received a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation to pursue her PhD, which she completed in 2008 at the Free University of Berlin where she also worked as a guest lecturer.

[4] In 2009, German Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung commented: "Her literary work combines post-colonial discourse and lyrical prose on the traces of slavery, colonialism and everyday racism".

"[6] In 2008, she became known to a wider audience through her book Plantation Memories (2008),[7] a collection of episodes of everyday racism in the form of psychoanalytic short stories, first published for the International Literature Festival at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

"In her performances, Grada Kilomba brings the oral African tradition to a contemporary context, using texts, narration, images and video projections to recover the memories and realities of a postcolonial world.

"[11] In recent works, Kilomba has increasingly been concerned with the performative staging of theoretical and political texts, including the film Conakry (2013) about the African freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral.

[12] She has developed the short film with director Filipa César and radio editor and activist Diana McCarty.

[13] Conakry was realized at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt ('House of World Cultures') in Berlin and shown at Art Tatler International, Kino Arsena at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art [de] in Berlin and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian ('Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation') in Lisbon, among others.

[14] In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Kilomba stated with regard to contemporary racism:[4] "We have to start posing other questions.

Kilomba touches this colonial wound by opening up a hybrid space in which the boundaries between academic and artistic language blur and the structures of knowledge and power transform.