Understood
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Samra Mayanja

Samra Mayanja is a senior tutor in Studio Practice on the BFA programme.

Samra Mayanja is an artist working across performance, installation, film and writing.  Her practice considers the illegibility of the body and the absurdist impulse to seek what is irretrievably lost. A continuously hopeful but seemingly futile act of searching runs through her work and manifests in performances that blend improvisation, slapstick, poetic monologues and tender vocalisations.

Samra Mayanja lives and works in London. Recent projects include Dead Dad Death Cult, Transmediale, Berlin (2025); Touch Me, Serf, Leeds (2024); All Islands Connect Underwater, CCA Glasgow (2023); The Living and the Stale, The Tetley, Leeds (2023); Bone Deep Deliverance (SCREAM II), LIVE Biennale, Western Front, Vancouver; scripted for a wayward narrator, London Short Film Festival (2022); and SWEAT, Somerset House, London (2021).

Her pamphlet My Will and Testament (Never My Last) was recently published with If a Leaf Falls Press (2025). Mayanja is the founder of Black Cinema Project and THE CALL CENTRE.

samra.mayanja@rsa.ox.ac.uk

A photograph showing the artist Samra Mayanja doing a performance. She is standing on a small green stool in the middle of a brightly lit room dressed in a black, full-length dress. People stand alongside the walls, watching her.
Samra Mayanja, photograph by Kwame Dappa.