Oluwaseun Babalola is an Emmy-nominated producer, Fulbright Specialist, award-winning director, and nonprofit founder/executive director (KOSINIMA, Inc.)
Oluwaseun Babalola makes films about Black life worldwide and builds systems that help other Black filmmakers do the same.
A Sierra Leonean-Nigerian Fulbright Specialist, Emmy-nominated producer, award-winning director, and DOC NYC 40 Under 40 honoree, Oluwaseun has spent more than a decade telling stories of travel, identity, and politics for CNN, HBO, AMC, Starz, and more. Her credits include the Emmy-nominated HBO film Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches and CNN’s United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell.
She created, directed, and produced ṢOJU, a three-season docuseries and media platform spotlighting youth culture in Africa and its diaspora, entirely independently. That experience led her to found KOSINIMA, Inc., a nonprofit that gives Black creatives grant funding and is a conduit for co-productions and collaborations between the African continent and its diaspora. As executive producer, she has funded and produced eleven documentary and narrative short films by Black female filmmakers.
Her narrative debut, Fighting Giants, which she wrote and directed in Sierra Leone, follows a mother and daughter searching for answers amid grief, inspired by her sister’s disappearance in 2018. Oluwaseun is also showrunner and producer of a Nigerian web series in post-production, and is developing her first feature documentary, with filming beginning in West Africa in 2026.