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I’m Judy, a filmmaker, artist and cultural infrastructure builder.
I’ve spent over two decades making fiction and documentary films—stories about power, memory, and contemporary African life in all its complexity and contradiction. My work has screened around the world and ranges from Something Necessary, a meditation on grief and reconciliation after Kenya’s post-election violence, to Killer Necklace, a stylish neo-noir about desire and class in Nairobi, to Dangerous Affair, one of Kenya’s first commercial romedys, to Scarred: The Anatomy of a Massacre, which refuses to let us look away from political violence and GOAT, a short Afro Spiritual thriller that explores the idea of ancestral debt.
I’m also a published author and one of the founding contributors to Kwani?, Kenya’s legendary literary journal, created by the late, and eternally fabulous Binyavanga Wainaina.
For 13 years, I founded and ran Docubox—Sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent documentary film fund I founded in 2013—turning it from a small home for our first six film grantees into a continental movement. Now I’m co-founding KEJA, a creative campus in Nairobi designed to be a literal home for ambitious and talented creative entrepreneurs looking to turn dreams to dollars. I’m also conceptualizing an idea my mother began, Fairview Estate & Gardens, transforming a part of my family’s coffee estate into a wedding and events venue that honors heritage while building something new.
I believe the best creative work happens when people have roots, resources, and room to breathe.
The path wasn't straight...
I came to this work sideways. I spent ten years in advertising, becoming East and Central Africa’s first non-expatriate Creative Director at McCann Erickson—the first woman, the first African. I learned how to tell stories that move people, but I also learned that the industry wasn’t big enough for me to tell the kinds of stories I needed to.
So I started building differently. First Seven Productions in 2006, where I made the films that refused compromise like Coming of Age won best documentary at African Academy Awards and Killer Necklace won best screenplay, film and direction at the innaugural Kalasha awards in 2009. Then Docubox (The East African Documentary Film Fund) in 2013, with a belief that African documentary needed long-term networks, opportunities to upskill and community, not just grants. Together, we created mentorship programs, festivals, “Shorts Shorts and Shots,” and a generation of filmmakers who now screen regularly at IDFA, Hot Docs, and Sundance and elsewhere around the world. Josh my life and work partner and I surprised a lot of people when I stepped down from leadership in December 2025 – not to retire but to move to the next big dreams.
I’m the daughter of Ambassador Leonard Oliver Kibinge (Kenya’s first Ambassador in residence to the United States of America) and Jane Kibinge (Kenya’s first commercial rose grower). Building things that last, and being “first” in spaces that weren’t made for us—that’s a family language I speak fluently.
These days, I’m deep in unfamiliar territory: real estate and catalytic capital, the slow, steady work of building things meant to outlast me. I’m a storyteller and an artist who builds institutions from the inside out — still becoming, still resisting the tidier label, and entirely comfortable with that. Renaissance woman will do for now.
This is the trailer for a film that Lindiwe Dovey made about me and my work. It is titled Out of the Box.
Click here to request the film directly from Lindiwe Dovey.
