Sophia Nahli Allison is an African American woman. She wears a burgundy decorative hat that has jewels hanging around the front. She has long dark hair and black glasses. Two silver nose piercings and a silver lip ring. She wears a black camisole shirt.

Sophia Nahli Allison

Los Angeles, California

Sophia Nahli Allison is an Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, self-portrait photographer, and artist from South Central Los Angeles. A black lesbian myth, she reimagines the archives by excavating hidden truths. She conspires with themes of flight, memories, dreams, and time to unearth and awaken spiritual archives while capturing the nuanced poetics of Black women’s interiority. Sophia is a 2024 DOC NYC “40 Under 40” honoree, the recipient of a 2020 United States Artists Fellowship Award, and a 2014 Chicago 3Arts Award. She has held residencies at Black Rock Senegal, MacDowell, The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France., The Center for Photography at Woodstock and American Documentary and POV Spark’s African Interactive Art Residency. She has directed national commercials such as Pandora’s Be Love and Lululemon’s A Woman’s Foot and was the photographer and creative director of Sleater-Kinney’s 2024 album cover, Little Rope. She received a 2021 Academy Award nomination for her short experimental documentary A Love Song For Latasha (2019), of which she was the director, cinematographer, editor, and a producer. She and her team had the first Latasha Harlins mural created in South Central Los Angeles in collaboration with Netflix and artist Victoria Cassinova that same year. Sophia was the director and co-writer of the 2021 HBO Max special Eyes On The Prize: Hallowed Ground. She holds a Master’s in visual communication from UNC Chapel Hill and a Bachelor’s in photojournalism from Columbia College Chicago. During the spring of 2024, she was a visiting professor at CalArts, teaching a course she structured entitled Memories and Dreamscapes.

No Kisses Like Youres’


Sophia Nahli Allison is a black lesbian myth. She is a self-portrait photographer, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, and artist from South Central Los Angeles.

Artist Bio

No Kisses Like Youres’ is a film and cinematic installation that captures an evocatively vibrant reimagining of two Black women who shared a kiss over 100 years ago that would stand the test of time. There remain significant gaps in the archive regarding queer intimacy among Black women during the early 1900s. As a result, photographic and cinematic documentation remains relatively non-existent. But, in 2022, filmmaker Sophia Nahli Allison acquired an authentic ‘real photo postcard,’ a rare and valuable historical artifact featuring two Black women boldly kissing while ‘flying high’ in a prop hot air balloon. In this moment of make-believe, they were free to escape, to dream, to be…

No Kisses Like Youres’ poetically rebuilds a dynamic visual narrative that envisions a rich historical past for Black queer women, bringing to life the story of the two women picturedRather than be deterred by the gaps in “official” archives, the film boldly explores the liminal space between absence and presence, where research and imagination intersect, activating portals of possibility. No Kisses Like Youres’ departs from conventional storytelling with its narrative ambiguity and impressionistic cinema, immersing viewers in the dreamlike and disorienting landscape of history and memory.

An avant-garde approach builds out the story of the women and unveils the whimsical world surrounding the photograph. As this nuanced and intimate history unfolds, truth and fiction begin to blur, revealing a complex, living, breathing archive.


Award Year
2025
Status

In Progress