ABOUT FUNMI
About
Funmi Iyanda is a multi-award winning Nigerian Entrepreneur, Writer, Film and TV producer, TV Host and Philantropist.
She is executive director at Oya Media, a London based media production studio and brand advisory set up to develop, produce and facilitate Films and TV shows for cinema, television and the web. She was co-founder and executive director at Creation Television UK. Funmi is best known for independently producing and hosting Nigeria’s most popular and groundbreaking talk show New Dawn with Funmi Iyanda, which ran nationally for eight years with unprecedented and yet unsurpased ratings . Famed for her intelligent, nuanced and irreverent interview style; Funmi quickly rose to become one of Nigeria’s most watched and revered TV personalities.
She has since gone on to produce and host a string of internationally nominated productions including My Country Nigeria, a 3 part series commissioned by BBC, and nominated for “Best News Documentary” at the 2011 Monte Carlo TV Festival. She is also the producer and host of BANFF nominated chopcassava.com, a gritty and innovative web series documenting the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy protests.
Her shows have been syndicated across Africa, including the critically acclaimed Talk with Funmi (TWF), an audacious socio-reality documentary television series. Funmi, along with a 30-man crew embarked on a harrowing but fulfilling road journey around Nigeria, capturing the people and conversations of the country. The result was a thought-provoking, illuminating and entertaining journey into the life of Nigerians.
Over the years, she has successfully started up four media companies which in addition to her own shows, have produced numerous TV documentaries, shows, events and special communications projects for media organisations as well as clients across spectrum of government, corporations and socio development. During her tenure as CEO of Ignite Media, the company turned over $6 million in two years employing 16 full time staff and 23 contractors, consultants and contract staff.
An innovator in her industry, Funmi has won tremendous recognition for her pioneering work in the media. She was honored as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and named one of Forbes 20 Power Women in Africa. Funmi is a member of the Tutu Africa Leadership Institute Board and Aspen Institute’s Global leaders Network. In addition, she serves on the Board of Farafina Trust. She is a graduate of the University of Ibadan and holds a certificate in Global Leadership and Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also an honorary fellow of the University of Cumbria UK, a BBC 100 women to watch lister and a UN women global equality champion.
She is the founder and board member of Change-a-Life foundation, a social intervention project birthed on her show New Dawn. Over the years, Change-A-Life has evolved into an independent charity with a respected Board of Trustees and dedicated staff. The foundation has affected the lives of many indigent families and children through its scholarship, healthcare, counselling and micro-finance schemes.
FUNMI’S DECLARATION OF INTENT.
We cannot reshape the present and pre-write the future without knowledge, the basis of knowledge is imagination.
A lot has been said about telling our own stories, often this is in response to the way others tell our stories. This is a problematic position as the challenge is not that “they” tell our stories badly (indeed they tell others’ stories badly) but that there is no “they”. We are all the other in some form or context.
Often glossed over is the crucial import of story interpretation in the telling and retelling of one’s own stories to one’s self and then to others, this includes how we process others’ stories in relation to our own reality and aspirations.
Most structured efforts at telling “Africa’s stories” focuses on the material, the hardware so to say. The heart of material is the abstract, that is the operating system, the complex tangibles and intangibles fuelling it’s intelligence.
We are already telling our own stories but we tell it badly and interpret it poorly, not just in terms of material technicalities which can be fixed but in terms of the abstract intention to humanise ourselves fully, stoke our imagination and encourage knowledge. The import of this is a dire need to reposition ourself in the comity of nations, bodies of knowledge and peoples of innovation by engaging fully with our own current realities to define and refine our best imagined future.
You cannot re-create your world without an excess of imagination, you cannot have imagination without knowledge of self and about self in relation to others and time. That is the heart of humanising confidence, the pool from whence innovation and audacity rises.
There are many ways to tell stories with imagination, intention and knowledge, my preference is pop culture through all forms of media as it’s an insidious yet powerful tool in wise hands.
This is where l come in. One of my life purposes is to gift the world the sort of content that allows us be fully human. I intend to gather a constellation of stars to create the magic that will fuel our imagination as Nigerian, human, people of Africa to ourselves and to the world.
This is not just a cultural imperative but the basis of innovative development of people of Africa and a restlessly latent commercial proposition.
-FUNMI IYANDA
TESTIMONIALS
“Funmi Iyanda was one of the best interviewers I’ve ever seen. Stunning. She understood everything immediately. Her questions were incredibly sharp. It was without equivalence in my experience”
~ Co-Founder OMA & Professor Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rem Koolhaas
“I’m so glad that I got to meet you in Aspen and that you are so much a part of this new young leaders concept”
~ Former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright