Maria Rosalie Young

Maria Rosalie Young aka Maria Rosamojo is a British Black Mixed Race Queer Filmmaker, Witch & Musician with Audhd. Her research explores how her greatest muse ‘My Mother, The Other, The Witch’ influences her creative process as a Performer. Daughter to a Spanish mum and Barbados dad, a battle-weary Maria grew up in 70s/80s Harlesden surviving racism and misogyny. For her MA (2020) she created a hauntological film based on these early experiences ‘Witchfinder Phenomenal’ which debuted at the Queer Film Festival in 2021. By imagining mythical role models in her bedroom mirror as a child, she reflected “I learned to disrupt witch-finding spectres of racism and misogynist violence by creating empowering narratives of magical realism to escape trauma”. Maria’s PHD research intends to develop her ‘Vivid Creatrix Visualiser’ as an intuitive matriarchal methodology to haunt back colonist and patriarchal British society. By conjuring up the wild feminine and creating Black Queer Hauntologies, Maria also plans to blend her autoethnographic research alongside fellow Black LGBTQIA performers in Brighton during the creative process.

Maria’s socio-cultural experiences span over five decades. She has a BA (HONS) Philosophy & Applied Psychology on Female Identity, Myth, and Psychoanalysis and fights stigma with creations like ‘The Invisible Illness Witch’, and ‘The Miss White Privilege infomercial’. As a singer/guitarist she’s played extensively in rock punk bands and produced albums ‘Black Sheep Cried Wolf’. As The Queer Bastard child of Monroe & Hendrix, Maria has performed at venues including Club Wotever, British Museum, Oxford Uni & The Queer Story Telling Festival. More recently, she’s produced ‘The Black Solidarity Manifesto’, came in the top 4% of BBC screen writers room for ‘Harlesden Cuckoo’, appeared on the RAI film festival panel with her video essay “On Colonial Trees in Academia”, and spoke at Radical Rhizomes for ‘Tales from our Elders’.

www.rosamojo.com
www.instagram.com/rosamojo