CLARE CRAIGHEAD is a lecturer in the Drama and Production Studies Department at The Durban University of Technology. She holds an MA in Drama and Performance Studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and has published in various local journals. Recently she co-guest edited an edition of Agenda titled “Gendered implications of new technologies and posthuman subjectivities: perspectives from the global South” which was released in early 2022. She is currently reading towards her PhD at UKZN, in Performance Studies with a focus on posthuman subjectivities. As company manager to FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, she has been involved in various dance-related activities and exchanges in KZN and, with the company’s strong dance-education focus. She is also facilitator/organiser of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience’s graduate writing residency programme “JOMBA! KHULUMA” which is an intensive platform that takes graduate students through the rigours of reviewing dance under festival conditions.
DAVID THATANELO APRIL is a director, teacher, choreographer, and lobbyist in the realm of South African dance and performance. As the Creative Entrepreneurial Officer of David April Arts Consultancy, he provides individualised, handson consulting services for public and corporate arts organisations, and educational institutions. With over two decades of experience in the Creative and Cultural industries he has filled a diverse collection of roles and imparts his longstanding knowledge of the performing arts as a dedicated mentor and advisor to arts practitioners and internationally acclaimed choreographers. April became the first recipient of the prestigious Tunkie Memorial Award for “Outstanding Dedication and Leadership in Dance” (2003). He’s received the “Management and Leadership in Cultural Economy” award from Wits School of Arts in Partnership with Business Arts South Africa. He is a graduate of Moving into Dance’s Community Dance Teachers Training Course, completed a BA at the University of South Africa and is skilled and qualified in Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Arts Management from institutions such as Raizcorp and IMM Graduate School of Marketing. He completed an MA in Cultural Policy and Management at Wits University and is currently employed at the University of Pretoria’s School of the Arts involved in Production Logistics alongside lecturing Arts Administration and Management as well as Movement Studies.
DR LLIANE LOOTS is a Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She completed her PhD in 2018 looking at contemporary dance/performance histories on the African continent. Loots holds the founding position of Artistic Director/Curator for UKZN’s Centre for Creative Arts’s annual international JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience – a festival that turns 26 in 2024. Loots founded FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1994. Loots has written extensively on contemporary dance histories in Africa and is currently working with Prof Yvette Hutchison (Warwick University) on a UKRI funded project looking at dance, disability and citizenship in Africa. Loots was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government in 2017 for her work (both artistic and curatorial) in the South African dance sector.
HANNAH MA is a bold feminist choreographer and founder of hannahmadance, an interdisciplinary company launched in 2015. Working across Germany, Luxembourg, and South Africa, her art tackles gender, race, colonialism, and identity through dance, installation, spoken word, and visual art. Rooted in feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial thought, Ma’s performances challenge power structures and center marginalized voices. Her works, like INVASIONS!, use movement as a form of resistance and radical transformation, envisioning a world of justice and equality. Ma is also a founding member of United Networks, a nonprofit uniting racialised and marginalised artists and activists in Germany, and serves as director of The People United in Luxembourg.
DR MBONGENI MTSHALI completed his PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He is Director of the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town. As a performance artist, scholar, and teacher, Mbongeni explores black queer/femme performance in South Africa as well as Africa and its diaspora more broadly, focusing on how performance is used toctico.lly to challenge nationally sanctioned repertoires of African respectability, cultural intelligibility and belonging. He has recently turned his attention to tracing queer genealogies of African decolonial world-making across the Caribbean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Mbongeni has collaborated on creative projects with The Other Foundation, The Buffet Foundation, the Institute for Creative Arts, the Weaver Hughes Ensemble, the Block Museum, The Court Theatre, Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, Hunan Opera House and the Artscape Theatre, among others. His recent professional recognitions include the Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award and the Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for notable achievements in directing and performance-making.
PROF SARAHLEIGH CASTELYN is a performer, choreographer, and researcher: a dance nerd. She is an Professor in Performing Arts in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at the University of East London (UK). Her dance research focuses on race, gender, sexuality, and nation in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the politics of hybridity, the use of practice as a research methodology, and the representations of mental illness in performance. She has performed in and choreographed dance works, for example at JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, serves on several editorial and organisation boards, such as Research in Dance Education and HOTFOOT. She has published on dance and South Africa, for instance, her book Contemporary Dance in South Africa: The Toyi-Toying Body (2022), in Viraf Dramaturgies (2018) and Narratives in Black British Dance (2018), and in journals such as The African Performance Review, Dance Theatre Journal, Animated, and The South African Theatre Journal, and is involved with the African Dance Disability Network.
THOBILE MAPHANGA is a South African dance practitioner, writer, and creative collaborator passionate about her continent and finding more holistic solutions to resolving issues of well-being and full living through the arts. She enjoys working across multiple sectors as she believes solutions can be sourced from varied understandings of the world and how people see and experience it. Her current re-occurring work endeavours are as Project Manager, Assistant Curator and Editorial Steering Committee member for JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, a 26-year-old international contemporary dance festival with an online colloquium. She plays the role of performer, dramaturg and creative collaborator with hannahmadance and the People United based in Germany and Luxembourg. She is co-convener of the African Festivals Network recently re-established in 2024. And currently serving as Co-Facilitator and Mentor for The Festival Academy. She recently joined Culturescape festival in Basel as they prepare to execute their second iteration of the Sahara edition.
PROF YVETTE HUTCHISON is a South African Professor in Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research focuses on Anglophone African theatre, history and narratives of memory, and how intercultural performance practices ore challenged by ongoing postcolonial issues. She is associate editor of the South African Theatre Journal and the African Theatre series. Her Leverhulme project Performing Memory: Theatricalising identity in contemporary South Africa in 2012, culminated in her monograph South African Performance and Archives of Memory (Manchester University press, 2013). From 2015-17 she had AHRC funding to develop mobile app technology to create a virtual network of African women creative practitioners and other interested parties, the African Womens’ Playwright Network. Her latest publications include the co-edited African Theatre: Contemporary Dance (James Currey, 2018), and Contemporary Plays by African Women (Methuen, 2019). Her current collaborative project with Dr Lliane Loots traces the relationship between disability dance and citizenship in Africa.