Kayode Oladeji

2026 Diverso Fellow
University of Southern California

Lion Poachers
Logline: When a former Nigerian SF operative forms a renegade team to rescue the forgotten and punish the powerful, they are pulled into a spiraling conflict that exposes the country’s darkest underbelly, and forces each of them to confront what kind of monster they have become.

Raised on movie nights that stitched his family together, Kayode Oladeji began as a theater kid and documentarian before trading that spark for a “real” future in Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. Building weapons instead of purpose left him hollow. The lectures he loved were not in thermodynamics but in film, philosophy, and music. A former AP calculus teacher turned DJ, he pursues his craft at USC, writing Afro-surrealist horror about guilt, isolation, and capitalism’s poisoned rewards, where Black men confront ghosts born of choices they were never meant to make.