The Collective is a production hub for culture. We produce music, films, oral stories and histories that stand at the Black/African and Iranian intersections, in an artistic effort to fight racial erasure and be the culture.

The Collective started from the stories 8 year-old Priscillia used to tell herself- pained by the silences around her experiences as a little black Iranian girl in Iran. Decades later and she reached out to different black Iranians, Iranians of African descent and other Iranians, and asked them if they’d like to join her on the Collective for Black Iranians. In 2020, the Collective was born and focused mainly on breaking the silences and educating. Today, the Collective is working on sustaining productions of culture, through music, art and film.

Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda
Founder x Creative Director x Producer

Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is a Black Iranian filmmaker (Where My Memory Began, We Will Be Who We Are), founder and creative director at the Collective for Black Iranians and co-founder and advisory board member of House of Salone, a production and creative agency that advises on critically conscious storytelling. A recovering human rights lawyer, Priscillia has worked with the UN in war affected countries negotiating the release of child soldiers in armed groups and implementing reintegration programming.

Priscillia’s visual storytelling is grounded in ancestral memory, intersectionality and Blackness to lyrically bear witness to Black life in its varied diasporic iterations.

Her first film, Where My Memory Began, a short lyrical film that tells the story of a 400-year-old Cotton tree that falls and that of an elder who returns to what’s left and tries to remember, premiered all over the world to critical acclaim (Locarno, HotDocs, NYAFF, PAFF, Aspen Shortsfest). Priscillia’s latest short film, We Will Be Who We Are continues to be celebrated (Vogue selection for “Women by Women”, NY African Film Festival, XPOSED, Festival Internacional de Curtas de São Paulo, Aesthetica).

She is currently working on two documentary projects, A Black Girl, from Iran, and Queens of Freetown, Searching for FannyAnn.

Priscillia is also a PhD candidate at Cape Town University with the departments of African Feminist Studies and Fine Arts where she focuses on racial blackness in Iran. She holds dual International Law and Business degrees from Sorbonne Law, ESSEC Business School, NYU Law and is a USC Film school drop-out.

Her work as a storyteller has been written about in multiple outlets, Screendaily, Variety, BBC World, BBC, AlJazeera, AJ+, Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality, France24, etc.

Priscillia lives between Sierra Leone and South Africa where she balances her filmmaking, research, the Collective for Black Iranians with productions and narrative consulting for the UN. She is a 2024 Atlantic Fellow on Racial Equity (AFRE 2024) and a United Nations 2020 Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD 2020).

Alex Eskandarkhah
Co-founder

Alex Eskandarkhah is a filmmaker, entrepreneur, public speaker and talk show host. He makes up one-half of the Gifted Gab, a media company centered on dialogue, storytelling and personal development. Alex is also the founder, writer/director and executive producer of Gamble Ave Filmworks, a production company specializing in underrepresented stories from shorts to features. In addition to that, he is a small business owner and operations director of several ventures, including Afro Era and Esfahan Persian Rugs. Alex was born to Iranian parents in Toronto, Ontario where he grew up and currently resides in Edmonton, Alberta. He graduated from York University in 2019, where he earned his bachelor's degree in Sociology. Alex has recently completed his broadcast TV hour directorial debut documentary project titled “Coaching While Black”.