In this section: Ntsiki Biyela, Janet Buckland, Michelle Constant and more …
Ntsiki Biyela
Winemaker
Stellekaya Winery
Tel: +27 21 883 3873
www.stellekaya.com
As South Africa’s first black female winemaker, Ntsiki Biyela is living proof of the South African dream and a rising star in her industry. Raised by her grandmother in rural Kwazulu Natal, Biyela now works as a winemaker at the Stellenbosch-based Stellekaya Winery.
While she initially wanted to study chemical engineering, her mentor, a wine connoisseur, encouraged her to study viticulture. She was given a full scholarship by South African Airways; and although her mother was afraid she would become an alcoholic, she opted for viticulture and oenology at the University of Stellenbosch.
She graduated in 2003, after having completed an apprenticeship at Delheim Wines. She joined Stellekaya in 2004 as a junior winemaker and is now their resident winemaker. Her Cape Cross 2004 and Hercules wines won gold and silver respectively at the Michelangelo International Wine Awards in 2006.
Janet Buckland
Artistic Director
UBOM! Drama Company
Tel: +27 46 603 8967
www.ubom.co.za
Jane Buckland is the 2008 winner of the Shoprite Checkers Woman of the Tear Award in the category of arts, culture and communications. Buckland is the founder of UBOM!, the first full-time professional drama company operating in the Eastern Cape. The company brings together grass roots community drama professionals and drama graduates, taking theatre productions to schools and communities around the province.
Buckland also started the Amaphiko Township Dance Project, runs the performance and workshop programme Art of the Street and has been the director of arts education projects at the Grahamstown Foundation.
Buckland, affectionately called Mama J, is based in Grahamstown, and is known for using her love for the arts to uplift communities in the Eastern Cape.
Michelle Constant
CEO
Business and Arts South Africa
Tel: +27 11 832 3000/3041
www.basa.co.za
Michelle Constant has worked in media for nearly twenty years. She was a journalist and presenter at Radio 2000, 5fm, Jacaranda and SAFM, where she produced four weekly shows on the relationship between arts and business. She has presented television shows for the SABC and e.tv and has hosted live events, including the Sama’s and the Brett Kebble Art Awards.
Constant has written for GQ, Empire and Business Day‘s Wanted magazine. She has been a judge for the Sama’s for more than 10 years; in 2002 she was appointed to the music advisory panel for the National Arts Council. Constant was named arts journalist of the year by the Arts and Culture Trust in 2004, and was a finalist in the Mondi Awards for her writing.
Constant also conducted arts and culture journalism training for Rhodes University journalism students and community radio stations. She was appointed CEO of Basa in July 2008.
Simphiwe Dana
Musician
Tel: +27 11 340 9600
www.myspace.com/simphiwedanaofficial
Simphiwe Dana came onto local music scene with a bang in 2004. Her debut album, Zandisile, won her a Sama for best jazz vocal album and best newcomer.
Born in the Transkei, her childhood influences were local artists Madosini and Amampondo, along with the gospel singing in her local church. Her vocally orientated music, which blends a maturing kwaito with afro-soul and jazz, is studied at the Eastern University of Oregon. She has performed at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz and has shared the stage with Angelique Kidjo.
Dana was nominated for a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music in Africa and, while touring Switzerland in 2006, received the Avo Session Arising Star award. In 2007, she released her second album, The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street.
Marianne Fassler
Fashion Designer
Tel: +27 11 646 8387
www.mariannefassler.co.za
After 25 years in the South African fashion industry, Marianne Fassler’s ranges have become a timeless local inspiration. Fassler is seen as one of South Africa’s most established, original and exotic designers. Her muse is Africa and all things African, and she finds her creativity in her home city, Johannesburg, where she is also influenced by urban subculture and traditional tribal dress.
She studied a BA (Hons) at the University of the Witwatersrand, but began making clothes to supplement her income, and was soon swept into the world of fashion. Fassler has won the Rapport /City Press Prestige Award and seven Fair Lady Fashion Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
She runs a children’s clothing label called Sibella, which is run by her daughter, and designs by appointment at her Johannesburg-based creative workshop and outlet, Leopard Frock, where she also mentors aspiring designers.
Nadine Gordimer
Novelist
Fax: +27 11 726 3417
Nadine Gordimer was part of Nelson Mandela’s entourage when he received the Nobel Peace prize in Oslo. She is a novelist and short story writer, having written books such as Get a Life in 2005, The Pickup in 2001 and short stories such as Beethoven was One-sixteenth Black in 2007. Gordimer has received numerous literary awards; the latest was the Grinzane Cavour Prize in 2007.
She has received more than 13 honorary degrees from different parts of the world and holds several honorary memberships and fellowships, including honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellowship in the Royal Society of Literature in England.
Harriet Gavshon
Director
Curious Pictures
Tel: +27 11 726 2828
www.curious.co.za
Harriet Gavshon is a co-founder and director of Curious Pictures, the South African film and television production company behind programmes such as Hopeville, Ghetto Diaries, Rhythym City and Soul City.
Gavshon was born and raised in Pretoria, schooled at St Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls and studied a dramatic arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. She also completed an MA in cinema studies at New York University and has taught at Unisa and Wits. She also helped to found the Free Filmmakers Cooperative in 1985 with artists such as William Kentridge and Angus Gibson, a project aimed at creating more relevant South African cinema.
She assisted in the formation of Weekly Mail Television, which later became Mail & Guardian Television, and finally, through a management buy-out, became Curious Pictures. Gavshon is married to Anton Harber, former editor of the Mail & Guardian and director of the journalism and media studies programme at Wits.
Janice Honeyman
Director
Tel: + 27 21 439 9128
Janice Honeyman recently directed the highly acclaimed Baxter Theatre Centre and Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest, which was performed at the Baxter, Stratford-upon-Avon and toured five cities in the UK.
Honeyman also directed John Kani’s Nothing But the Truth at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, while her latest production, I Am My Own Wife, was performed at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. She won the Fleur du Cap for best director in Nothing but the Truth, Vatmaar and Oom Wanja/Uncle Vanya and won an FNB Vita Award for The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
In 2007 Honeyman directed the world premiere of Chris van Wyk’s Shirley, Goodness and Mercy (which won three Naledi awards) John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Karabo Kgomotso Kgoleng
SAfm Presenter
www.safm.co.za
Karabo Kgomotso Kgoleng joined SAfm in 2007 as a presenter of the weekly on-air programme SAfm Literature. For the past two years she has been promoting literature and language, interviewing local and international authors such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri and Zapiro.
On weekdays Kgoleng hosts SAfm’s Afternoon Talk. She studied science at the University of Witwatersrand and is pursuing a degree in communication science. Her radio career began in 2002 when she joined Radio Islam and Channel Islam International as a presenter.
Kgoleng is a popular public speaker and a board member of Alliance Francaise Johannesburg, which promotes art development in the city. She contributes book reviews and opinion pieces for Y-Mag, Afripolitan, Al-Huda and OneSixSeven.
Leleti Khumalo
Actress
Tel: +27 11 788 4873
In 1985 Leleti Khumalo became the face of Mbongeni Ngema’s international blockbuster Sarafina in a lead role created specifically for her. The play, which was made into a movie in 1991, scored her a staring place alongside Whoopi Goldberg and she received a nomination for an Image Award for her role.
In 1987 she received the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People Image Award for best stage actress and was nominated for a Tony Award for best actress. Born in 1970 in the Durban township of Kwa Mashu, Khumalo joined the dance group Amajika as a young girl, under the mentorship of well-known musician Tu Nokwe.
She appeared in the movie Cry, The Beloved Country alongside Richard Harris and James Earl Jones and was also in Darrell Roodt’s Yesterday, which was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film in 2005, playing an HIV-positive wife and mother.
Sibongile Khumalo
Singer
www.sibongilekhumalo.co.za
Sibongile Khumalo’s mezzo-soprano voice has graced several classic operas. In 2007, she joined forces with African American drummer Jack DeJohnette on a world tour as part of the Intercontinental project; more recently she was a part of Philip Miller’s Rewind Cantata, a multimedia musical presentation based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Last year, Khumalo received the national Order of Ikhamanga in Silver, an acknowledgment of her outstanding contribution to the country. She has graced world stages, performing concerts in Egypt, France and the UK.
Khumalo holds music degrees from the University of Zululand and Wits and has taught and researched music at the University of Zululand, Fuba Academy and at the Madimba Institute of African Music.She has also acted in several musicals such as Marabi, Baby Come Duze, Once on this Island and Goree. In April 2009 Khumalo received an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University.
Antjie Krog
Author
Tel: +27 21 959 2911
Antjie Krog’s writing spans poetry, plays and novels. Country of my Skull, an epic introspection about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was released in 1998. The book received the Alan Paton award for best South African non-fiction and was made into a feature film in 2003.
Krog has published eight Afrikaans volumes of poetry and she also translated Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom into Afrikaans. A Change of Tongue was a work of English prose chronicling the ten years of change following South Africa’s first democratic elections.
Born in Kroonstad district in 1952, Krog received the Eugene Marais prize for most promising young writer when she was 21, won a Herzog Prize for poetry in 1990, received an honorary mention at the Noma Awards in 1996 and a Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in 2000.
Pauline Malefane
Singer
www.u-carmen.co.za
After studying at UCT’s College of Music, Pauline Malefane joined the Lyric Theater company Dimpho Di Kopane to play Mary in Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries and the title role in a new translation of Bizet’s Carmen to international audiences.
Malefane won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2005 and the Golden Thumb from US film critic Roger Ebert for her role in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. In 2006, she acted in, co-wrote and translated Son of Man, which won best feature at the PAFF film festival in Los Angeles and the Founders Prize at Michael Moore’s Festival in Michigan.
The following year she won the Safta Award for best actress in a feature film. The Magic Flute Impempe Yomlingo, in which she appeared at the Young Vic and on the West End, won the 2008 award for the best musical revival at London’s prestigious Laurence Olivier Awards.
Rebecca Malope
Gospel Singer
www.rebeccamalope.net
Gospel queen Rebecca Malope has sold more 3.7-million records, making her South Africa’s best-selling musician. Born in Lekazi, near Nelspruit, she came to Johannesburg in 1986 seeking her big break. It came a year later in the form of the Shell Road to Fame Award for best female vocalist.
Malope enlisted the help of Sizwe Zako and music agent Peter Tladi to raise money to record her debut album. It topped the charts in a matter of weeks and reached gold status, catapulting her into fame. Her seventh album, Shwele Baba , is the fastest selling record in South African history.
Malope has won an OKTV award for best South African female artist in 1989/90 and the FNB South African Music Award for best gospel singer in 1994.
Lebogang (Lebo) Mashile
Artist
www.lebomashile.com
Acclaimed poet, presenter, actress, producer and artist Lebo Mashile was born in the United States, while her parents were in exile, and returned to South Africa when she was 16.
Mashile holds a degree in law and international relations from the University of Witwatersrand, but found her calling in poetry and the arts. She rose to fame in 2002 when she co-founded the Feel a Sistah! spoken word collective. Her first poetry collection, A Ribbon of Rhythm (2005) won a Noma Award in 2006, and was followed by a second anthology, Flying Above the Sky (2008).
Mashile made her acting debut in the Oscar-nominated film Hotel Rwanda in 2004, performed in the stage-adapation of the Quiet Violence of Dreams and wrote and performed in Threads , a cross-media fusion of poetry, music and dance. Mashile is currently a presenter of the SABC debating game show Drawing the Line.
Dorah Sithole
Magazine Editor
Tel: +27 11 322 0836
www.truelove.co.za
Dorah Sithole has taken South African cuisine to the US, Japan, Thailand and Brazil. In Rome Sithole cooked for former President Thabo Mbeki’s entourage of South African captains of industry and Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi. A cordon bleau chef, she’s also an accomplished travel, nutrition and food writer and stylist.
Now the editor of True Love magazine, she has authored Recipes with a Touch of Africa and co-authored Cooking Step-by-Step with Don Nelson. Her second book, Cooking from Cape to Cairo, was published by Tafelberg in 1998 and republished by NB publishers 2009.
Sithole received four Galliova Awards for food writing and styling and now serves on the prestigious Galliova Awards judging panel. In 2006 she was one four of recipients of the inaugural South African Chefs Presidents Award for outstanding contribution to the country’s hospitality industry.
Jann Turner
Filmmaker and Journalist
www.jannturner.co.za
Jann Turner is a filmmaker and journalist. She covered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for SABC TV’s Special Report , co-created local TV drama Mzansi and Hard Copy and was a director on Isidingo .
Turner has written three books: Heartland, Southern Cross and Home is Where You Find It . Turner’s father, Rick Turner, was a teacher and activist against apartheid who was assassinated in January 1978. She made two documentaries about her father, Need To Know , for Channel 4 in the UK, and My Father Rick Turner, for e.tv in South Africa.
Turner, Rapulana Seiphemo and Kenneth Nkosi1s latest project is White Wedding , which is her first feature film. She attended New York University’s Graduate School of Film and TV.