As Bradford settled into its year as UK City of Culture, the Bradford African Festival of Arts 2025 returned with growing ambition and visibility.

Held on 16 August 2025 at Centenary Square, the festival transformed the city centre into a vibrant stage for African and diasporan artistic expression through music, theatre, dance, storytelling, visual arts, and fashion.

At the centre of Ghana’s contribution was Carl Selorm Dovi, who held a dual role in 2025 as Creative Producer and Artistic Programmer within BAFA’s wider creative structure, while also serving as Artistic Lead and Performance Curator for the Ghanaian community.

His appointment by the Ghana Union Bradford came at a time when community leaders wanted to strengthen Ghana’s connection to the festival after relatively modest participation during its maiden edition. Dovi’s task was not simply to organise performances, but to shape a more confident and artistically cohesive Ghanaian presence within one of Bradford’s most significant African arts platforms.

“My responsibility was not just to organise performances,” Dovi said. “It was to shape how Ghana would be seen. Because Ghana lives in me, I understand how to present it and leave a mark in the minds of the audience”

The impact was visible across the festival weekend. Ghana’s contestant, Rosemond Oware, won the BAFA 2025 African Countries Showcase competition and emerged Queen of BAFA 2025 through a cultural folktale narrative of Ghana’s natural resources and its cultural significance.

This was judged by an independent panel that included Deputy High Commissioner at the Kenya High Commission in the United Kingdom, Edwin Afande, Professor Uduak Archibong and Professor Engobo Emeseh.

The evening before the main festival, Carl Selorm Dovi produced and programmed Combined Arts Stage Drama Night at Theatre in the Mill as part of the festival’s connecting events programme.

Built around the festival’s theme of Ubuntu, the sold-out multidisciplinary theatre production brought together adapted stage plays, spoken word, hip-hop dance, music, and visual arts in a single curated evening.

Produced in partnership with Instinct Pictures and directed by Christopher Iheuwa, the programme featured A Palm Tree in London and Second Thought, works exploring togetherness and belonging across African and British experience.

The venue’s 80-seat capacity sold out completely, drawing a cross-community audience from Bradford’s African and Afro-Caribbean communities alongside wider Yorkshire audiences.

The production is regarded as one of Bradford’s first genuinely Pan-African international theatre collaborations staged within a professional theatre venue.

Many of the artistic ideas behind BAFA 2025 had already been explored in Dovi’s earlier production, the Ghana 67th Independence Culture Buffet in 2024, which was a multidisciplinary programming, community-rooted storytelling, and diasporan artistic presentation that remained central to his curatorial approach.

According to Ben Tetteh, Dovi’s appointment reflected a desire to move beyond cultural representation as symbolism alone.

“We appointed Carl because we needed someone who could shape how Ghanaian culture would be presented within a major public arts festival,” Tetteh said. “He delivered exactly that.”

Dovi’s work was formally recognised through a Certificate of Excellence awarded by Festival Director and Convener Dr Olushola Adeborode Kolawole on 17th August 2025 during the post-festival celebration night.

“Carl brought clarity, discipline, and genuine artistic intention to the Ghanaian community’s participation in BAFA 2025,” Dr Kolawole said. “What stood out was not only the quality of the performances, but the thought behind the programming.”

Within just two years of joining BAFA, Dovi had progressed from early artistic programming involvement to producing sold-out theatre work, leading a prize-winning national showcase, and building international creative collaborations during Bradford’s City of Culture year.

What is emerging is not simply a series of community events, but a developing diasporan arts practice rooted in collaboration, cultural confidence, and artistic purpose that uses Bradford as a base to ask serious questions about how African cultural identity is produced, presented, and received in Britain.