Sikhumbuzo Makandula is a visual artist working with photography, video and performance art and arts writer from De Aar, South Africa. He studied Fine Art at Rhodes University, South Africa, and did a residency at the Nelson Mandela Museum, Mthatha in 2010. He works mainly with photography, video and performance art with his first solo exhibition at Njelele Art Station in Zimbabwe. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and art fairs  both nationally and internationally such as the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna, at !Kauru 2015: Towards Intersections at UNISA Art Gallery in Pretoria, the Joburg Art Fair, That Art Fair in Cape Town and Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland. He is also an arts writer and has published in the academic journal, Arts of Africa with his artworks have been featured in the book Acts of Transgression Contemporary Live Art in South Africa, Art Africa magazine, Africanah.org and Contemporary And online magazine.

He is currently a researcher at the Institute for Creative Arts, University of Cape Town.

Xolisa Ngubelanga, is a writer, youth development facilitator and theatre maker from the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. He co-founded Uhuru wa Maisha Arts and Culture Movement and went on to establish Jo Kinda – People to improve the learning culture and space in schools in townships in Port Elizabeth and Pearston. Xolisa has written numerous play scripts including the acclaimed Flamebook, Dinner with Bantu and Pieces of An African Drum which have toured in South Africa and won numerous awards.In 2011 he was awarded the National Lotto Development Trust Fund to attend the TUT International Arts, Society and Sustainable Development Conference and present his paper ‘Art Products as Cultural Symbols’ on the importance of art in restoring the African image. Currently, he is running two programs through Jo Kinda - People; Sara Baartman Creative Scientists using poetry and arts to promote maths and science in rural schools and Ndinephupha ‘I Have a Dream’ Youth Talks a platform allowing young people to voice concerns and aspirations for their communities.

He holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Rhodes University.  

Mosa Anita Kaiser is a South African born, lens-based artist. She graduated with distinction from Rhodes University in 2017 with a triple major in Art History & Visual Culture Studies, Studio Practice and Political Philosophy & International Studies. Following this, she enrolled at the Market Photo Workshop for their Advanced Photography Programme. As a contemporary artist she positions herself at the intersection of years of unfolding, conflicting and evolving ideologies of art making, and seeks to engage visual culture and visual literacy as fundamental components to how we consume the world around us and as a means to piece together our understandings and our identities

She has exhibited her photography at the Pretoria Art Museum as a Sasol New Signatures 2016 merit award winner as well as at SMAC Gallery, Cape Town as part of a group show of emerging young artists titled ‘Disclosure’ in 2017. In addition, she exhibited with the F-stop Club SA, Edition One at the Market Photo Workshop and at Through The Lens Collective, Victoria Yards for an exhibition titled (in)sight in 2019.

She currently manages the Website Photographic Content Generating and Publishing area at The Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg.

Erick Msumanje is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. He holds a bachelors degree in art from Hampshire College and a Masters in Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. His work primarily focuses on telling meditative and poetic stories that blur the lines of fiction and non-fiction. This has involved filming in Haiti, Tanzania, and various parts of the United States. His short film The Devil’s House, was awarded the Five College Best Documentary and featured at Salem International Documentary Festival. In 2012 he was awarded the John H. Johnson Princess Grace Award Grant for film making. Mother’s Songs won the best film award at the 2015 Filmmatic Film Festival and was screened at the Historic Northampton Film Series. In 2018, his film Volta had a world premiere at the Fribourg International Film Festival.

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He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Bongani Njalo currently lives and works in Port Elizabeth where he studied Fine Art at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, majoring in Stained Glass. Njalo is a 2014 recipient of the David Koloane Award and was named one of the Top 200 Young South Africans in 2016 by the Mail & Guardian for his contributions to the cultural landscape of South Africa. With extensive experience in public programs and social engagement in the arts in South Africa, Njalo has worked as Project Leader for organisations across the country such as the Mandela Bay Development Agency (PE), Market Theatre Foundation (JHB), Arterial Network (Cape Town) and the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. In 2017, he was selected as a cultural ambassador to the United States by the U.S. Department of State as a Mandela Washington Fellow and serves as a founding and steering committee member for the African Cultural Policy Network for Culture, LGBTIQ+ and Human Rights. He is currently practicing as a full-time artist and independent curator. Njalo is an MA (Arts Policy and Management) candidate at Birkbeck University of London.

Monique Pelser was educated at the Market Photography workshop in Johannesburg in 1996 and received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Rhodes University Grahamstown in 2005 she where she majored in the photographic arts. In 2006 she was awarded a Master of Fine Art with distinction. In 2009 she was awarded the Tierney Fellowship for photography which led her to being awarded a full scholarship toPhotoGlobal at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2012/13. She co-curated t Témoin/ Witness with Sammy Baloji, which opened at the Recontres Bamako Biennale, Mali in 2011 and toured 11 various centers across Africa.

She has lectured in photography and visual art at Rhodes University, Wits School of Arts, Stellenbosch Visual Arts Department, AAA School of Advertising and the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg. She has continued to exhibit locally and internationally.

Amirah Tajdin is a Kenyan artist and filmmaker. She graduated from Rhodes University with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Photography) in South Africa and Goucher College Maryland (USA). 

Over a ten year period of film-making she has crafted a signature style of blending reality with fiction through her strong visual language in both her commercial and cinematic work. This has seen her helm campaigns for branded content, fashion films, music videos and TVCs for brands such as Cadillac, Saudi Telecom, Bloomingdales, Virgin Mobile, Pepsi and the Louvre Abu Dhabi make up some of her portfolio. The latter being a case study film for TBWA/RAAD’s Cannes Golden Lion for ‘The Highway Gallery Project’.  Her branded content film SISTERHOOD: ACTION for Girls Who Code was a Tribeca X Award 2019 finalist. She is a Sundance Institute fellow making her the first Kenyan director to be selected for both the Screenwriters Labs (Utah, 2017) and Director’s Lab (Utah, 2018) for her feature film currently in development. 

Her short film Marea di Tierra was in main competition at Sundance (2016) and Cannes Director’s Fortnight (2015) and went on to play over 20 festivals globally. She has also directed various award winning and nominated short films and feature length documentaries. 

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Currently, she splits her time between Africa and the Middle East balancing freelance commercial directing work as well as independent fiction and documentary both locally and internationally and forms the creative half of SEVEN THIRTY Films an Africa based indie production company, which she founded in Nairobi in 2011 alongside her sister, producer Wafa Tajdin.

Mark Wilby has worked in the film industry for close on forty years, primarily as a production designer. He twice received VITA awards for Art Direction, and, as writer/director, had two of his short films as finalists in successive Weekly Mail Film Festivals.

Mark interweaves his film activity with fine art practice, exhibiting work that challenges boundaries between the physical and virtual, between public spaces and the gallery. His work has twice received the Judges Award on the Sasol New Signatures Competition. Mark’s composite practice was recently recognised with a lifetime achievement award from the Eastern Cape Department of Arts and Culture.He holds a MFA Degree from Rhodes University as is currently head of Post Graduate Studies, AFDA (South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance), Port Elizabeth.

Prof Vulindlela Nyoni was born in Chilimanzi, Zimbabwe and attained a Bachelor of Arts in the Fine Arts from the then University of Natal in 1998 and a Masters in fine Arts from the now University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2006. His Masters thesis was entitled “Representations of ‘other’ in selected South African artworks: Re-membering the black male body”. Prior to moving to Port Elizabeth, Prof Nyoni was the Academic Coordinator of the Centre for Visual Art, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg), and Senior Lecturer in printmaking at Stellenbosch University. Apart from being a practicing artist, Nyoni also lectures in Printmaking at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. His main interests lie in Diaspora studies, Gender and Sexuality; and the politics of representation and self-representation through print media with a particular interest in the dynamic of collaborative printmaking. Prof Nyoni has exhibited widely and is represented in both national and international collections.

Brent Meistre is a photographer, curator and film maker.  

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He has been a finalist in the Daimler Chrysler Award for Contemporary Photography in South Africa and received the first Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum’s Biennale Award. His work has been featured on the Bamako Photo Biennale in Mali, The International Black Film Festival in Canada and the Kunstvlaai: Festival of Independents. His work has also been shown on Making Way: Contemporary Art from China and South Africa and his SOJOURN project was featured on the Head-On Photography Festival in Australia and the Pingyao Photo Festival in China. In 2013 his extensive SOJOURN project was exhibited on street poles across Cape Town as a part of the Terminal GIPCA LAND project.

He is the founder of Analogue Eye: Video Art Africa, a mobile drive-in & pop-up cinema that showcases the works made by 47 African video artists. This was featured on the main program of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and Infecting the City (The Africa Centre) in Cape Town, South Africa. Analogue Eye was also featured on the Wiener Festwochen in May/June 2015 in Vienna, Austria and the Internationale Schillertage in Mannheim, Germany in the same year.

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He has taken part in a number of residencies including Nirox in the Cradle of Civilization, South Africa and more recently in Castelfranco Veneto, Italy for the Nord Est OmneLab and as a part 10 artist team of the Sound Development City project between Madrid and Casablanca in 2016.