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I’m Judy, a filmmaker, artist, and cultural advocate
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 features in this genre, 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 thirteen years, I founded and led Docubox—Sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent documentary film fund—growing it from a small home for six grantees into a continental movement. Now I’m co-founding KEJA, a creative campus in Nairobi conceived as a home for ambitious creative entrepreneurs. I’m also working to transform part of the grounds of my family’s coffee estate into a destination that honours heritage whilst 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 films that refused compromise — Coming of Age won Best Documentary at the African Academy Awards and Killer Necklace won Best Screenplay, Film and Direction at the inaugural Kalasha Awards in 2009. Then Docubox in 2013, with a belief that African documentary needed long-term networks, opportunities to upskill, and community — not just grants. Together, we created mentorship programmes, festivals, and a generation of filmmakers who now screen at IDFA, Hot Docs, and Sundance. In December 2025, I stepped down from leadership — not to retire, but to move toward the next chapter.
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 exploring unfamiliar territory: spatial development and catalytic partnerships, the slow, steady work of building things meant to outlast me. I’m a storyteller and an artist who shapes communities from the inside out — still becoming, still resisting the tidier label, and entirely comfortable with that.
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.
