Arthur Musah – Filmmaker

Born in Ukraine, raised in Ghana, and now living in the United States, Musah is a filmmaker whose work often explores characters shaped by multiple places. His debut feature Brief Tender Light was released theatrically in New York and Washington DC and had its US-wide broadcast premiere on PBS/POV on MLK Day 2024. The documentary secured coproductions from ITVS and American Documentary | POV, won the 2020 Paley Doc Pitch competition, and garnered support from the Sundance Sandbox Fund, the DCTV Docu Work-In-Progress Lab, Cinephilia Bound, the California Film Institute’s DocLands DocPitch, the Hot Docs Forum, the Gotham Documentary Lab, and hundreds of backers on Kickstarter. Brief Tender Light has won several festival awards, including the Jury Prize for Best Documentary Feature and the Audience Award for Best Feature Film at the 2023 Urbanworld Film Festival in New York, and the Best First Feature Documentary award at the 2024 Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles. He also completed the award-winning short documentary Naija Beta in 2016 which is available globally on Vimeo. Musah studied filmmaking in the MFA program at the University of Southern California as an Annenberg Fellow. He also earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and worked as an engineer for two decades. Musah lives in New York, where as a gay Ghanaian he organized protests against Ghana’s impending LGBTQ+ hate bill (article) and other state-sanctioned violence against Ghana’s queer community. Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.