Beks

As a result, she knows how to clear space for other perspectives. She works as a filmmaker, writer and healer. 

Beks, who has African, Flemish and Native American roots, was born and raised in Flanders but has lived in Amsterdam since 1993. She started her education at the drama and cabaret school Studio Herman Teirlinck in Antwerp and then moved to Amsterdam, where she completed her studies at the Theatre School Selma Susanna. In the first years of her career, she worked as a spoken-word performer, poet and theatre maker. In 2002, she won the Hollandse Nieuwe Toneelschrijfprijs and her work shifted more towards writing and talent development.  

Beks founded Writing Workshop Frascati in 2003 and debuted in 2014 with her novel The Kleenex Chronicles. She went on to write the children's book Sala and Monk - Us Together (2020), the essay collection Echo (2021) on the intersectionality of womanhood and being Black, and The Little Morrison, a signpost to Toni Morrison's oeuvre that will be published in a translation in Castilian Spanish in autumn 2024.   

Her interdisciplinarity is reflected in her films, such as the documentary Eigen Volk (2011) about the far-right voices in her family, the documentary Mookie (2012), which won Best Documentary awards in Italy and Mexico, and Beyond My Walls (2015) about social media. She also filmed portraits of the artists Maria Barnas and Jeroen Henneman.  

In 2018, she founded Alphabet Street the Tank, a guild and think tank for Black and BIPOC visual language artists. Beks was also one of the ‘Season’s Thinkers’ for Concertgebouw Brugge, where she deepened her transdisciplinary work at the intersection between literature, music and healing with the design of energetic rituals for women.