With the tragic passing of one of avant-garde cinema’s most important contributors, Chantal Akerman, here are six other female filmmakers whose contributions to the tradition of experimental film continue to change the landscape of art cinema, Indiewire‘s Aubrey Page writes, and lists Ghana’s Akosua Adoma Owusu as one.

The five others include: Maya Deren, Barbara Hammer, Janie Geiser, Shirley Clarke, and Germaine Dulac.

Page describes her as:

a filmmaker whose exact style is difficult to pin down. An African filmmaker by all accounts, her work spans from experimental documentary (in films like “Me Broni Ba”), sprawling fable retellings (in the Africa Award-winning “Kwaku Ananse”) and avant-garde ethnographic accounts.

A filmmaker interested in what she calls the “triple consciousness” of the African immigrant, Owusu is known to problematize the hair of African women in order to extrapolate the greater cultural anxieties surrounding her racial legacy. Trafficking in the “complex contradictions” of blackness, displacement and memory, Owusu seamlessly transitions between experimental cinema, fine art and African tradition in order to create avant-garde films that question the nature of identity.