ByNERIA BARR

When the skies over Israel darkened with sirens last month, Italian-Ghanaian documentarist Fred Kudjo Kuwornu found himself crouched in a Tel Aviv shelter alongside international students and professors from Brazil, India, and Ethiopia. He was in Israel as a guest of the ERC FemSMed research project, which is held at Tel Aviv University.

“It was crazy,” he recalls now. “But it was an experience that made me reflect on how lucky I am, and how sometimes we don’t have real empathy for others until something happens to us, close up.”

For Kuwornu, whose life and work have long defied borders, those tense hours underground became just another unexpected chapter in a career devoted to shedding light on overlooked corners of history and the tangled roots that connect us all. His latest film, We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, is a vivid testament to that mission.

This spring, Kuwornu was named a winner of the Dan David Prize, one of only nine global recipients this year of the world’s largest history award, which is bestowed by the Dan David Foundation. For Kuwornu, the recognition affirms not just a single film, but a lifetime’s work chasing stories hidden in archives, paintings, and people’s forgotten memories, and bringing them back to life in classrooms, festivals, and living rooms everywhere.

Rewriting the Renaissance

We Were Here does exactly that. What began four years ago as a shoestring project, “just me, my camera, my train ticket,” as he puts it, grew into an ambitious visual journey through art, archives, and cutting-edge animation. A surprise invitation from Adriano Pedrosa, the Brazilian curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale, opened the door for the film to be shown at the Central Pavilion under the theme “Foreigners Everywhere.”

People take shelter in an underground train station in Tel Aviv, during ongoing missile attacks from Iran, June 22, 2025.
People take shelter in an underground train station in Tel Aviv, during ongoing missile attacks from Iran, June 22, 2025. (credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90)


“Everyone knows the Renaissance,” Kuwornu says. “The paintings are icons. But people forget that inside these paintings there are Black people too, real people who were there, but no one asks who they were. I wanted to give them back a story, to bring them out of the frame.”


To do that, Kuwornu combined interviews with leading scholars, dramatic reenactments, and new AI-driven animation that slips beyond the gilded edges of oil masterpieces to whisper long-silenced truths.


“AI is changing how we can animate now,” he explains. “You can take a figure from a painting and imagine it moving, drinking, living.”


This is how forgotten figures, a page in a noble court, a musician in a royal chapel, an attendant behind a Venetian merchant, return to us with a name, a place, a glimpse of a life that European art history has too often airbrushed away.

Border-crossing root

Kuwornu’s own story makes him uniquely equipped for this work. Born in Bologna to an Italian mother, who only discovered her Jewish ancestry in her 30s and later reconnected with her community, and a Ghanaian father who came to Italy in the 1960s to study medicine, Kuwornu grew up at the crossroads of multiple identities. He still divides his time between Italy and the United States, carrying Italian, Ghanaian, and American citizenships, a living testament to the tangled, hybrid stories he unearths.

“I always felt the story of Europe was more complex than it says on the surface,” he says. A chance job as a production assistant on Spike Lee’s 2007 Miracle at St. Anna, the World War II drama about African-American soldiers in Italy, set him on his filmmaking path. Since then, his camera has tracked the overlooked legacies of Black soldiers who helped liberate Europe (Inside Buffalo, 2010), the fight for citizenship for second-generation immigrants in Italy (18 Ius Soli, 2012), and a century of Black actors on Italian screens (Blaxploitalian, 2016).

His next projects promise to be just as unexpected: a monumental video installation called Adinkra Tree, where West African symbols and proverbs sprout from the branches of a giant baobab tree projected onto gallery walls.

And a deeper dive into the remarkable story of Saint Benedict the Moor, born in Sicily to enslaved African parents in 1524, later canonized by the Vatican, and now venerated by Afro-descendant communities across Brazil, Colombia, and Peru.

“For me, it’s always the same thread,” he says. “Southern Europe sees itself as purely white, purely Catholic, but it’s never been true. We are all mixed. We just forget it.”

Keeping history alive

Perhaps uniquely among filmmakers, Kuwornu doesn’t just make films; he turns them into living, breathing conversations. He has screened his documentaries at more than 400 universities worldwide, from the Library of Congress to the Museum of the Moving Image.

“I don’t sell to TV because they would limit the life of the film,” he explains. “My income is the traveling, the talks, that’s how these stories live, in a room, between people.”

It’s why the Dan David Prize feels so fitting: not a medal for research locked in archives, but an award for public history that crosses borders, ignites debate, and reminds us that history is never truly behind us.

In 2025, alongside the Dan David Prize, Kuwornu also received the Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, recognition that his work does not stop at one continent or century, but connects legacies from Shakespeare’s England to modern classrooms in Minnesota.

Even in the midst of air-raid sirens, his mind is on the next untold chapter.

“I wanted to film it,” he laughs, remembering the tense hours in the Tel Aviv shelter. “But of course, it was not a nice experience, so I didn’t. Still, it makes you see what people live through in war, how fragile life is. That’s why we need to tell these stories, and remember we were here.”

Fred Kudjo Kuwornu’s We Were Here premiered at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His work has been supported by the Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Africa No Filter, the University of Minnesota, the Cineteca di Bologna, and many others, but his favorite stage remains the university seminar room, where a single painting can still stop a young student in their tracks and reveal who really stands beside them in history’s long, unfinished frame.