Tiécoura N’Daou

Tiécoura N’Daou is a Multimedia artist who graduated from the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia in Bamako. His talent spreads in a plural practice centred around multimedia, video and photography. Strongly rooted in Malian culture and traditions, he closely follows technological transformations while trying to combine tradition and technology. His professional and artistic journey punctuated by several exhibitions and residencies around the world such as the Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, The Bamako Biennials, and Dak'art.

His work is characterized by a big sense of the narrative and its progress, a prolific imagination, the deep empathy with its subjects, a very personal aesthetics, a real precision in shooting, a sure capacity to restore complex atmospheres, nostalgia or anxiety of the time which passes. He produces very strong poetic and original work.

Shaka Ramulifho

Shaka Ramulifho is a University of the Witswaterand Alumni with a background in Finance and Information Technology. His academic background includes Double majors in Finance and Management as well as an IBM Global Sales School certification. He has worked for multinational organizations like IBM for over 5 years dealing with financial government departments including the South African Reserve Service (SARS) and winning multiple awards including the 2016 IBM Manager Choice Award.

In 2017, He founded Sunkambe, dubbed the stock exchange of music. The startup has won multiple awards including Massachusetts Institute of Technology Global Start Up Labs in 2017, Seedstars regional Pitch Competition in 2018 and 2019 Digital Lab Africa competition.

Sunkambe was formed to address the issues of artists being trapped in poverty in mainly developing continents due to owning on average less than 30% of their music rights including royalties. Sunkambe gives back 100% of the music rights including royalties after 18 months.

Marvin Madyara

Marvin Madyara is a Zimbabwean born Creative and Start-Up Entrepreneur. He is also a Media Futurist & Augmented Reality Tech junkie. Apart from being one of the Digital Lab Africa 2019 winners, Marvin Madyara is a 2018 YALI Mandela Washington Fellowship Finalist. Marvin Madyara has over 15 years experience in Advertising, Media and Technology where he worked as a Creative Director, Editor-In-Chief, Art Director, Web Developer, and a Film producer in his previous communication sciences journey. Marvin dropped out of University twice to pursue a path in Entrepreneurship where he founded a countless number of successful and failed initiatives. He currently works full time as Founder and Head of Product Innovation at Phygital Africa LAB, the creators of Swaggify.

Shmerah Passchier

Shmerah Passchier has worked in film & television since 2000 writing, directing & producing for MTV Base, travelling to 10 African countries shooting in Nigeria, Cameroon, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya, Botswana, Angola, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia. She has directed Music, Magazine & Reality TV and documentaries for SABC 1, 2 & 3, as well as drama for Mzansi Magic. Her work includes a documentary on Nelson Mandela & the End of Apartheid for the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Shmerah has an MFA in filmmaking, an MA in Anthropology and she is currently reading for a PhD in Virtual Reality at Wits. Shmerah is a lecturer at AFDA.

Moratiwa Molema

Moratiwa Molema is a painter, sculptor and multi-media dance theatre artistic director. She directs dance performances of various scales for theatres, site-specific performances, opening sequences for TV & corporate events, as well as art galleries in Botswana, South Africa, Kenya and India. Her creative interest is bridging traditional aesthetics, digital age technology, using projection, light, costuming and storytelling in dance and music. Currently, she teaches at AFDA Botswana and stages productions through her company Moratiwa Productions. She also runs her dance crew Poetry in Motion in Gaborone.

Shannon Bennetts

Shannon Bennetts is an artist, animator and one quarter of Falling Up Studios, a start-up gaming company based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She studied at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg Campus), completing her undergrad in Fine Art and Digital Art in 2016, and her post-grad with an Honours degree in Digital Art in 2017 (both with summa cum laude). Throughout her academic career, she has held a fascination with the use of art to place the viewer within her own headspace. This was explored through creating portraits featuring expressive strokes and lines to portray internal emotions, animations filling the rooms they were created in, and eventually culminating in the creation of a short videogame in her Honours year which dealt with her experience as a sufferer of OCD. It was the intensely immersive aspect of videogames that drew her to this medium - one that allowed artists to craft worlds and narratives that viewers could become completely enveloped by and invested in, and one that she is excited to explore to its furthest extent. She has exhibited work at various exhibitions - most notably as part of the 24th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in 2018 – and is currently working as an animation intern at Katanimate Studios in Durban.

Lwazi Msipha

Lwazi Msipha is a young South African Director and Animator who founded Old Fashioned Youngin. Old Fashioned Youngin is an emerging Johannesburg-based character animation company that aims to explore innovative solutions for creating high-quality animation at a lower budget and less time than it would take to make traditional animation. He earned a diploma in animation at the highly acclaimed The Animation School in Johannesburg South Africa, graduating in 2017 as the Co-director and lead animator of the award-winning film 'The Boy and the Mask'. Lwazi is currently working on several IPs of his own, one of them being Ringa Mzansi. Ringa Mzansi is an animated talk show that deals with contemporary world issues through a sharp lense of satire and comedy, voiced by Ebenhaezer Dibakwane. Ringa Mzansi was awarded development funding by the NFVF, selected for the NFVF showcase at the Capetown Comic Con 2019 and has won the Digital Lab Africa 3 pitch competition which will see the project being developed in a tailor-made incubation program in France. Ringa Mzansi was also selected as one of the five honorary representatives to represent South Africa at the South Africa territory focus at Annecy MIFA 2019.

Xabiso Vili

Xabiso Vili is a performer, writer and social activist. His writings explore his inner world to relate to the outer world. He is the champion of multiple slams and poet of the year 2014/2015. Xabiso has been published in various anthologies and online. He has performed all over South Africa, in Scotland, the U.S. and India. He strongly believes that art influences his community positively and is constantly working towards creating alternative stages for art to be shared. Xabiso also runs writing, performance and event organizing workshops through Scribe Rites, a performance writing collective he co-founded that has produced other award-winning writers and performers. He also works with various abandoned spaces in Pretoria and converts them into art hubs. He released his album, "Eating My Skin", created with Favela Ninjas in 2016. His one-man show “Black Boi Be” has travelled extensively to critical acclaim in 2017 and “Laughing In My Father’s Voice” is his first collection of poems released in August of 2018.

Naddya Adhiambo Oluoch-Olunya

Naddya Adhiambo Oluoch-Olunya is an Animator and Illustrator driven by the need to understand, and represent girls and women through her work. For the past 9 years, she has been creating content for children, specializing in comics for Social and Behavior Change Communication in Nairobi, Kenya. She began her practice as a comic illustrator with Shujaaz.fm, a 2 time International Digital Emmy® winning multimedia project, which harnesses the power of comics, radio and social media engagement to host a conversation with Kenyan Youth about their world, their place in it, and practical ways to make it better.

After Shujaaz.fm, She joined ZanaAfrica, a social enterprise dedicated to developing safe spaces, sexual and reproductive health platforms and menstrual healthcare products for girls and women. As Supervising Illustrator, she led the creation of illustrated content for Nia Teen Magazine, a publication and safe space for girls to have a candid, celebratory and compassionate conversation about themselves.

She left her post at ZanaAfrica in May and has since founded Sunflower Pictures, an animation studio committed to producing fresh and nourishing stories. The Studio’s flagship project; ‘Uzi’ won the CICLIC Prize at Animation du Monde at the 2019 Annecy International Animation Festival, and it’s currently on it’s production journey.

Setriakor Nyomi

Setriakor Nyomi is an indie game developer passionate about telling African stories. He has over 10 years experience in digital animation and game development, designing montages and short skits for television stations and NGOs in Ghana. In 2013 he released Oware 3D, which sought to combine a traditional African game with cutting edge graphics and technology to create an immersive and authentic casual gaming experience. Oware 3D went on the win the MTN maiden apps challenge and was 2nd runner up in the World Summit Awards’ African Content category. He moved on to work with African Leadership University as a tech lead and subsequently to the position of director of sustained engineering. He started Grey Parrot Studios in 2019 to pursue his vision of telling African Stories using games and other interactive experiences. His maiden product Mancala Plus represents the first of the game ideas Setriakor hopes to bring into fruition that aims to tell African stories using gaming as a medium.

Kombo Chapfika

Kombo Chapfika is a Zimbabwean multi-disciplinary visual artist. His work focuses on social commentary, combining elements of African and Western pop iconography, patterns, and surreal figurative elements. A mostly self-taught artist, he works to reveal how art transcends any singular medium and how each discipline can inform the others. His hybrid aesthetic echoes his personal journey as a mobile African artist and active participant in the ongoing cultural churning and mutations brought on by globalization. His work evokes layers of interpretation, current awareness, visceral energy, and suggestive storytelling. He considers his aesthetic a hyperbolic, but recognizable visual language that expresses the immense potential and current dire straits of Zimbabwe, and Africa at large.