Rodney Bidi Kimbangu

As a writer, producer, director, cinematographer, and editor, Rodney has made short films including Lituka (2019), a personal project that followed an entrepreneurial young boy who makes charcoal stoves in the Congo (DRC), Unfulfilled (2020), a student color grading capstone project, and Forever in Motion (2018).

During his time at Berea, in 2018, he became a University Innovation Fellow, and shortly after attended the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, where he was part of a summer eight-week intensive Filmmaking program. Rodney is a life-long learner driven by a deep desire to produce thought-provoking and intriguing art. One of his leadership superpowers is connectedness. He sees things the way they can become, and believes everything is connected. Because of it, he enjoys taking online classes whenever he can, and has taken Masterclasses in Directing, Filmmaking, Documentary, Photography, Performing, and Acting. Some of his instructors, as well as Masterclass instructors include Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Spike Lee, Ken Burns, David A. Armstrong, Shane Hurlbut, Andrew St. Pierre White, Annie Liebovitz, Usher, Christina Aguilera, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jordan Brady, to name a few.

He then moved to the United States of America to attend Dartmouth College in 2016 under the Mandela Washington Fellowship (President Barack Obama's flagship program). There, he studied Business and Entrepreneurship with a focus on Design Thinking and Design Driven Entrepreneurship. A few weeks later, he then went on to attend Berea College to earn a double degree in Painting and Film & Media Production.

In 1996, his elder sister, ten years senior to him, who was living in France for years, moved back to Kinshasa. One day she saw him finger drawing on the sand and told him that he had the gift to become an artist and that he should keep at it. He did not take it to heart because he planned on becoming an electromechanical engineer until the artistic inquiry took over him in high school.

Rodney Bidi Kimbangu was born on February 8, 1992, in Kinshasa, Congo (DRC), to Innocent Kimbangu and Josephine Bidi. He grew up in Ndjili, a suburban part of Kinshasa, where he went to Bonsomi, a Jesuit high-school. After Bonsomi, he attended an engineering school and earned an associate degree in civil engineering.