How Heather Agyepong Found Herself in ‘Shifters’

Agyepong, an actress and visual artist, didn’t imagine a creative career for herself early on. But at 15—a transformative year, it turns out—she had a drama teacher, “Mr. Lord,” who saw her innate talent. “He was a godsend. He really spoke life into me,” she says. Now, decades later, he attends her show openings.

She has always admired—and striven to emulate—the work ethic of her parents, both Ghanaian immigrants; Agyepong’s father was a manager in the Harrods seafood department and her mother worked for the NHS. “They showed how much they loved us with how much they worked,” she says. “I wanted to make sure I was grafting and not taking their sacrifices for granted… How do I honor them, but also honor myself? I think that’s the dilemma sometimes with second-generation kids.”

Agyepong picked up a camera at 19, after her first year studying psychology at the University of Kent, and found her voice in the medium. At first, it helped her to process her emotions and address her mental health, making visible “different parts of [myself], either to help accept them or understand that they have no power over me.” Drawing from the likes of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Søren Kierkegaard, her work continues to maintain a psychological underpinning of exploring the self.

Her early photo projects, including Too Many Blackamoors, focused on women from history whom she felt were forgotten or ignored, using their lives as a template to explore her own. “I wanted to see images of Black women that are fragile and delicate and exposed. It was such a leap of faith,” she says.

In 2022, she shot ego death, a cathartic body of work based on Jung’s concept of the shadow self. “We all have these repressed parts of ourselves that are deemed wrong or ignored or buried,” Agyepong says. Visually, she was drawn to “the idea of revelation and truth-telling being seen as blue on Black skin,” inspired by Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight.

When working on these projects, she says, “I’m more myself than I am in real life. The camera feels like such a caring, empathetic lens.” That empathy has extended to her acting work. At 25, she made her theatrical debut in Theresa Ikoko’s Girls at the Talawa Theatre Company in Croydon and signed with an agent soon after. That’s when she began juggling photography and acting—and never really stopped.