Black and Brown: The New Myco(eco)logists

Maya Han
2026 release, US, video, 25 min.

Fungi are foundational to our planet, literally buttressing the entire earth through their extensive underground mycelial networks. Mycology, or the study of fungi, has traditionally been associated with (Northern) Europe where it is a recent discipline and one that has benefitted from, yet eclipsed or erased, Indigenous and African diasporic cultures’ long and rich histories with the fungal kingdom — histories which span millennia and embrace the scientific, culinary, medicinal, and shamanistic. This short documentary recenters the gaze back on Black relationships with nature via the fungal world. This world, unlike the green realm of plants that photosynthesize, is characterized by the brown —  the rich, dark, loamy soil and umbery tree bark in or on which many fungi dwell, to the brown melanin most mushrooms contain, as well as the colloquial term for common cap-and-stem LBMs, or “little brown mushrooms”.

Black and Brown: The New Myco(eco)logists spotlights, in intimate and poignant portraits, the exciting citizen science and eco-activism of three young American trailblazers of African and Caribbean heritage — Journei Bimwala, Maria Pinto, and Maren Fossi — who are restoring myco-cultural histories and changing the ways we access, study, and think about nature and fungi.