Meet Our Film Fellow: Lanre Olupona
Olanrewaju Olupona comes to The Sahara Centre with a decade of practice in visual storytelling, and a clear sense of what film can do when it takes social life seriously as its subject.
His credits include Director of Photography on Battleground (MNET) and Gidi Blues, and editorial work on documentaries such as Movement: Japa and Unmasked: Leadership, Trust and COVID-19. These projects reflect a commitment to using the documentary form to make visible what is otherwise overlooked or misread.
As Festival Manager with iREPRESENT International Documentary Film Festival, Lanre has helped build one of Africa's most significant platforms for documentary cinema. His corporate work, with Interswitch, First Bank, and Quickteller, has required a different but complementary skill: translating complex institutional narratives into coherent visual language. Both strands of his practice point to the same underlying discipline: clarity about what an image is for.
At The Sahara Centre, Lanre is building The Mangrove Sessions film screening series. The film series are designed as a space for critical engagement with art, culture, and social transformation.
We are glad to have him.
Meet Our Literary Fellows: Oreoluwa Olaolu and Dr Olubukunola Roberts
04, October 2025
The Mangrove Book Club sits within The Mangrove Sessions as a space for reading as a shared and critical act. To lead it, we needed people who understand how literature shapes how communities think, and how individuals find language for experience. We found two people!
Oreoluwa Olaolu (Didi), FCA, FRM, MSc, brings a background in audit and risk management to her work as a reader and community builder. She currently manages a conservation fund in North America focused on protecting land for future generations. The analytical discipline that work demands has sharpened her attentiveness to how systems hold together.
For five years, she has convened a private book club based on a conviction that reading together produces something that reading alone cannot. For Ore, books are portals and the book clubs become spaces through which personal experience coalesces to become collective wisdom.
Olubukunola Roberts (Buki), PhD, works at the intersection of global health, digital innovation, and organisational development. Her professional experience includes work with NYU Langone Health. She also hosts a podcast exploring health, equity, and everyday life.
What draws Buki to the book club is what draws her to most of her work: the possibility of connecting ideas across disciplines, and of turning large questions into things that are actually usable across various contexts. She is most alive in spaces where health, education, culture, and creativity converge. For Dr Buki, Mangrove Book Club is one of those spaces.
Together, Oreoluwa and Buki will lead the club's programming, selecting texts and shaping conversations that emerge. We look forward to what they build.
