Amy Louise Wilson is a performer, writer and co-founder of the Lo-Def Film Factory, a pop-up experimental community cinema collective. Since graduating from Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town with an Honours Degree in Drama, she has appeared in numerous local and international film, television and theatre productions. Notable credits include Fox’s The Book of Negroes and the Netflix series Troy: The Fall of a City. Theatre credits include the Fugard Theatre’s The Father and The Mother. She has been experimenting with creating solo performance, beginning with her living-room performance-lecture Other People’s Homes which she created in New York. Her new play Another Kind of Dying won the 2020 Distell National Playwright Competition.
Aphiwe Livi is a Cape Town based actor, dancer and choreographer. He began his performance career in African, Gumboot, contemporary and fusion dance as a member of the physical theatre organisation Iqhude Theatre Production under the direction of Thembelihle Mananga. He then studied performance at New Africa Theatre in 2008, and contemporary dance at Jazzart from 2009-2011. He has performed as a dancer in numerous Jazzart productions at the Artscape and Baxter Theatre. In 2013 he branched into acting, appearing in Mandisi Sindo’s ‘The Widow’ at Infecting the City, Thando Mzembe’s ‘The Playroom’ at Zabalaza festival (for which he was nominated for best supporting actor) and the Market Theatre, Joanna Evans’ award-winning ‘The Year of the Bicycle’ as well as ‘In Ongenade’ directed by Jaco Bouwer. Aphiwe has toured extensively around South Africa, as well as to international festivals with Mamela Nyamza and Mohau Modisakeng to name a few. He has also appeared on films like Isikizi , Imali and uThando no Guluva on Mzansi Magic .
Joanna Evans is a South African theatre artist, playwright and performance scholar based in New York. Both her scholarly research and creative practice unfold in the spaces of improvisatory and ensemble performance making, moved by anticolonial exigency, material animacy, and queer intimacy. Her plays have toured throughout South Africa, as well as to international festivals in Italy, Germany, Iran, Hungary, Réunion and the United States. These include Four Small Gods (Imbewu Trust Scribe Award), Patchwork (Best International Performance, Hamedan Arts Festival), and The Year of the Bicycle (Silver Ovation Award Winner, South African National Arts Festival; published by Junkets Press). Joanna is also a co-founder of Inala, one of South Africa’s first Theatre for Early Years companies, which conducts experimental research into performance for pre-verbal audiences. Joanna holds a BA in Theatre and Performance from the University of Cape Town, and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, where she is currently working towards a Ph.D.
Francois Knoetze is a Cape Town based performance artist, sculptor and video artist. His work highlights the connections between social history and material culture. He scrutinizes the life cycles of consumer objects which he reactivates once they have turned into waste. He completed an MFA at Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT) in 2015. That year, Knoetze was featured as one of Mail & Guardian Newspaper’s ‘Top 200 Young South Africans’. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (2015 & 2017) and in group exhibitions at the Lagos Photo Festival (2015); Gallery MOMO, Cape Town (2018); Kunsthal KAde, Amersfoort (2018); and Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale (2018). He was an Africa Centre Resident and 2016 laureate of the Nafasi Art Space Artist-In-Residence Programme (Dar es Salaam); and attended the OMI International Art Center Residency Programme (New York) in 2017. 2018 saw him participate in Cosmopolis 1.5: Enlarged Intelligence (Chengdu) hosted by the Pompidou Centre, as well as Digital Imaginaries – Africas in Production at ZKM, Germany. In 2019 his work was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre as part of Cosmopolis #2. He is a recipient of Hivos’ Digital Earth Fellowship.
Dumama + Kechou are a future folk duo made up of Eastern Cape-born Gugulethu Duma and Kerim Melik Becker. Duma was mentored by the iconic multi-instrumentalist Xhosa musician Madosini, who taught her to play and handcraft uhadi and umrhubhe. Their recently launched album ‘Buffering Juju’ was released to critical acclaim.
