Your Queens at Ten: African Royalty Brought to Life
ZPG Visual Archive Feature · Organization Profile
Your Queens at Ten: African Royalty Brought to Life
Ten years of living African royal history through research, costume, storytelling, music, dance, performance, and portraiture.
History Instead of Fantasy
A different kind of character company.
Your Queens launched in January 2015 with a direct purpose: to evaluate, educate, and express the dynamic lineage of historic African Queens and Kings.
In a character-entertainment world often dominated by fiction, Your Queens built its identity around documented history.
The organization brings figures including Queen Amina of Zaria, Queen Makeda, Queen Nzingha of Angola, Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Goddess Isis, and King Tut into public view through storytelling, music, movement, costume, dance, and ceremonial presence.
Those elements function as teaching tools. The costume attracts attention. The movement creates presence. The story creates context. Research gives the experience historical authority.
Your Queens does not ask history to remain on the page. It asks history to enter the room.
A Founder Building Access
Performance became a way into the history.
Founder Ekiuwa Asemota, described in the ZPG archive as a dancer, teacher, designer, and entrepreneur, recognized that many young people and adults had limited access to African history.
Live performance created another point of entry. Costumes invited curiosity. Movement held attention. Character made the history visible. Research provided the foundation.
The result is not simply a series of royal costumes. It is an educational system built around the idea that historical knowledge can be encountered through voice, body, design, movement, and memory.
THWACPEP · BLINK NY
From movement into stillness.
I encountered Your Queens during its early formation through The How We Are Connected Photo Exploration Project and BLINK NY.
The portraits were built around posture, garment detail, symbolism, and presence.
Performance normally moves. Portraiture asks it to pause. In that stillness, the performers became cultural carriers rather than simply entertainers.
One image from the work later appeared in an international exhibition, extending the photographic record beyond the original portrait session.
Documentation gives the present a future.
Ten Years of Consistency
Cultural work becomes authority through repetition.
Over a decade, Your Queens has taken this educational approach into hundreds of organizations and community settings.
When I Perform
History becomes personal through embodiment.
The strongest evidence of the project’s approach appears in how the performers describe the act of stepping into character.
Eki · Queen Makeda
Wisdom in Motion
Wisdom · Faith · Power“When I perform I feel strong, powerful and know that I am providing healing, love and truth.” Ekiuwa
In the supplied Your Queens character framing, Queen Makeda is presented through intelligence, spiritual depth, knowledge, curiosity, humility, and purpose.
Her journey toward wisdom becomes part of the lesson: authority does not eliminate the need to listen, learn, and seek understanding.
Your Queens: @yourqueensinc
Performer: @ekisfamous
Location credit: @calabarimportsbklyn
Photography: @zirephotos · @zirephotosfashionandstyle
Rah · Queen Amina of Zaria
The Warrior Queen
Warrior · Strength · Courage“When I perform, the feeling is surreal. Each time I perform, I completely transform and become my character. I no longer represent Rasheena, I am Queen Amina.” Rah
In the supplied Your Queens material, Queen Amina is presented through governance, military leadership, discipline, strategy, courage, expansion, and the defense of land and people.
The quote reveals the central transformation behind the project: the performer is not simply describing the Queen. She is attempting to inhabit the responsibility of representing her.
Your Queens: @yourqueensinc
Performer: @big.rah_
Location credit: @calabarimportsbklyn
Photography: @zirephotos · @zirephotosfashionandstyle
A Living Archive
Leadership, intelligence, resistance, beauty, and memory stand in front of the audience.
Your Queens presents history through people standing directly before other people.
Children encounter African leadership, governance, resistance, intelligence, beauty, spirituality, and cultural authority through live characters rather than distant abstraction.
Adults are given an opportunity to reconnect with knowledge that may have been limited, fragmented, or absent from their formal education.
Each appearance therefore becomes more than entertainment. It becomes a temporary living archive: history carried through voice, body, costume, movement, design, research, and memory.
The costume opens the door. The history is what gives the appearance weight.
The Visual Archive
Royal identity held in stillness.
These portraits preserve individual performers and the distinct character language each brings to the larger Your Queens visual world.
The Photographic Record
A sequence, not a set of isolated highlights.
The strongest documentary photographs do not explain themselves all at once.
They hold posture, gesture, spacing, clothing, material, expression, light, and visual symbolism inside the same record.
Viewed together, these portraits become more than separate images of individual performers.
They reveal a connected visual language: how character is built, how the performers occupy space, how stillness changes the meaning of costume, and how individual presence carries cultural interpretation.
That is where portraiture becomes preservation.
Why the Record Matters
Performances end. The record gives them another form.
Documentation begins with observation before it becomes presentation.
A camera can study how people carry history in real time and preserve moments that might otherwise survive only through memory.
Performances end. Public gatherings move into the past. Organizations grow. Costumes change. People move into new stages of life.
A well-built visual record lets future viewers encounter more than the fact that something happened.
It preserves something of who was present, how the moment looked, what values were being carried, and why the work belonged to a larger cultural continuum.
That is why Your Queens belongs in the ZPG editorial archive.
The portraits remain available for reflection, cross-linking, exhibition, publication, and future cultural study because the moment was documented with intention.
One Story · Multiple Relationships
Follow the people, the connection, and the region.
The Your Queens feature remains one canonical Publish story while appearing through the related areas where its cultural relationships make sense.
Everyday People
The people carrying the cultural record.
Portraits centered on identity, presence, expression, culture, transformation, lived experience, and the person inside the story.
THWACPEP
How are we connected through history and identity?
The How We Are Connected Photo Exploration Project creates another pathway into the relationship between people, heritage, culture, memory, and shared experience.
BLINK NY
Follow the New York cultural pathway.
BLINK NY connects people, organizations, artists, communities, culture, events, places, and visual memory through the regional archive.
Editorial Credits
