Clare Craighead is a Lecturer in the Drama and Production Studies Department at the Durban University of Technology (DUT), South Africa. She holds an MA in Drama and Performance Studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and has published in a range of local scholarly journals. Her research interests include contemporary performance practices from the Global South, feminist posthumanisms and new materialisms, and practice-led research methodologies, with particular attention to questions of embodiment, performativity, and liveness in contemporary performance. In 2025, she co-published with Dr Dianna Moodley Artist or Imposter! Breaking Barriers and ‘Dancing’ the Data…, which examines artistic authorship, creative research processes, and embodied knowledge production in higher education. Craighead has recently submitted her PhD in Performance Studies at UKZN for examination. Alongside her academic work, she serves as Company Manager of Flatfoot Dance Company and contributes to the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience through initiatives including the JOMBA! KHULUMA graduate writing residency and the JOMBA! Masihambisane Dialogues programme.
Hannah Ma is an international performer, choreographer, curator, and producer with roots in Hong Kong/ Southeast Asia and Berchtesgaden/Europe. Her work engages ritual, emptiness, and intersectional storytelling through queer feminist and decolonial perspectives. She works with the body as soul and food as home, memory, and archive, co-creating experiences that move through thresholds, grief, transformation and aura weaving. She is also trained as a death doula.
Dr Lliane Loots is a Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Howard College Campus). She holds a Master’s degree in Gender Studies and completed her PhD in 2018, focusing on contemporary dance and performance histories on the African continent. Her work as an artist-scholar is grounded in ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches, with narrative as a central methodology. Loots is the founding Artistic Director and Curator of the Centre for Creative Arts’ annual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, an international festival that celebrates its 28th edition in 2026. She also founded FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY in 2003, which developed from a training initiative established in 1994. As artistic director and resident choreographer, she has received numerous national awards and commissions, and has presented work across Europe and Africa. She has published widely on contemporary African dance histories and, most recently, with Prof Yvette Hutchison (Warwick University), co-authored Encountering Disability and Citizenship Through Contemporary Dance in Africa (Routledge, 2026). In recognition of her contributions to the arts, Loots was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2017.
Dr Mbongeni N. Mtshali is a Fulbright Scholar and holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. He is currently Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town. Mtshali is a multidisciplinary performance practitioner working across choreoscenography, animation and puppetry, and site-specific performance installation. Recent professional recognitions include the Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award and the Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for his achievements in directing and performance-making. His research, both practical and theoretical, centres on black queer/femme performance in South Africa and across Africa and its diaspora. He examines how the unruly aesthetics of black queer/femme performance challenge nationally sanctioned performance repertoires and the frameworks of African respectability, cultural intelligibility, and ethnonational belonging those repertoires uphold. His more recent work traces queer genealogies of African decolonial world-making in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean.
Prof. Sarahleigh Castelyn is a performer, choreographer, and researcher: a dance nerd. She is an Associate Professor/ Reader in Performing Arts in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at the University of East London (U.K.). Her dance research focuses on race, gender, sexuality, and nation in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the politics of hybridity, and the use of practice as a research methodology. She has performed in and choreographed dance works, for example at JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience (SA) and Queen Mary (UK). She 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 in Viral Dramaturgies (2018) and Narratives in Black British Dance (2018), and in journals such as The African Performance Review, Dance Theatre Journal, Animated, African Performance Review, and The South African Theatre Journal.
Smangaliso Ngwenya is a dancer, performer, writer, director, choreographer, and videographer, and the founder of Isifiso SakaGogo Performance Theatre (est. 2020). His work is rooted in dance and movement as embodied practices that enliven ancestral knowledge, lived experience, and creative expression. Ngwenya began his formal training with First Physical Theatre Company while completing a Bachelor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University (2013–2016). He further developed his practice at Vuyani Dance Theatre (2017–2019) and earned a Master’s in Cultural Policy and Management from the University of the Witwatersrand (2018–2020). He has choreographed eleven works, including the Standard Bank Ovation Award-winning screendance F-R-A-G-M-E-N-T-E-D Scribbles (2020), as well as Glare (2020), Home? (2020), Evelyn (2023), and the Solitude trilogy (2025). His practice is grounded in experiential, practice-led research and embodied knowledge production. Ngwenya has worked as an Education and Training Officer at The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (2022–2023) and has lectured and facilitated choreography, movement, and screendance at Wits University since 2019. He is currently pursuing a PhD, deepening his focus on Afrocentric, embodied creative research.
Thobile Maphanga is a South African dance practitioner, writer, and creative collaborator dedicated to fostering holistic well-being through the arts. With a focus on social change, she champions festivals as vital spaces for public dialogue, knowledge sharing, and peer-to-peer learning. She serves as the Project Manager and Assistant Curator for the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience and is the co-convener of the African Festivals Network. Her international work as a speaker and mentor for The Festival Academy explores decolonisation, inclusivity, and the unique perspectives of the Global South. As a writer and digital artist, her work has been featured in TURBA, In Dance Magazine, See Chicago Dance, People United: Performing Arts (on) Paper, Hotfoot and JOMBA! Khuluma. Maphanga sits on the boards of The Festival Academy and Flatfoot Dance Company, and is a liaison board member for Durban University of Technology’s Drama & Performance Studies Department. She remains committed to cross-sector collaboration to find diverse solutions for better living.
Prof. Yvette Hutchison is Professor of African Performance Studies in Theatre & Performance Studies, which is part of the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research focuses on Anglophone African theatre, history and narratives of memory, and how intercultural performance practices can challenge ongoing postcolonial issues. She is associate editor of the South African Theatre Journal, on the editorial committees of Performing Ethos and African Performance Review, and co-founder of the African Women’s Playwright Network (AWPN.org). Her latest research has been as Principal investigator on a UKRI-funded project that culminated in Encountering disability and citizenship through contemporary dance in Africa (Routledge, 2026) with Dr Lliane Loots (UKZN, SA) with whom she co-hosts the international African Dance Disability Network (https://africandancedisabilitynetwork.org/).