Sophia Nahli Allison is a Black lesbian myth. She is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, self-portrait photographer, and artist from South Central Los Angeles. Her work traverses time and space, activating memory as cinematic portals.
She is the recipient of a 2025 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 USA Fellowship. She was the director, cinematographer, editor, and co-producer of the experimental documentary A Love Song for Latasha (Netflix, 2020), which was nominated for a 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. Allison directed and co-wrote HBO Max's Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021) and has directed national commercials for Pandora (Be Love, 2024) and Lululemon (A Woman's Foot, 2022). She was the photographer and creative director for Sleater-Kinney's album cover, Little Rope (2024). She has been awarded artist residencies at MacDowell, Black Rock Senegal, the Camargo Foundation, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and POV Spark's African Interactive Art Residency in collaboration with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture.
At MacDowell in 2019, she worked on several essays to accompany her immersive visual project Dreaming Gave Us Wings. The project has received support from a Women Photograph + Nikon grant and was published in early 2019 on The New Yorker. Shortly after finishing her fellowship at MacDowell she completed an artist residency with POV Spark's African Interactive Art Residency in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
During her 2025 residency, Allison worked on the development of her experimental narrative film Prologue. Told through a cinematic dreamscape, Prologue awakens a love story between two black women in the early 1900s. The film is based on a photo Allison acquired, over 110 years old, that depicts two black women kissing in a hot air balloon. The project received a 2025 Creative Capital Award.
