Melissa Chemam

Bilingual journalist (English/French), writer, and radio/podcast/documentary producer.
I cover mostly African news and diaspora's lives & cultures.

I lived & reported in Europe, then in the United States & Haiti in 2008, in England in 2009 for the BBC World Service, in East Africa from 2010 to 2012, then in Central Africa in 2014.

Back in Europe, I started working on African-European relations, on documentary projects (with Raoul Peck), on the "refugee crises", on anti-colonial narratives.

In 2015, I came to Bristol to write a book about the birth of its counter-culture. The book retells the story of graffiti artists and bands like The Pop Group, the Wild Bunch, Massive Attack, Tricky, Banksy, etc. It was released in France in Oct. 2016; in the UK/US in 2019 under the title "Out of the Comfort Zone".

Between September 2019 and June 2022, I also worked as a Lecturer in Media/Journalism & as the writer in residence at the Arnolfini international Art Centre in Bristol, UK.