Sydelle Willow Smith
Sydelle Willow Smith is a documentarian and media advocacy strategist working across Africa, based in Cape Town, born in Johannesburg. Her studies included time at The Market Photo Workshop, an Honours Degree in Visual Anthropology at The University of Cape Town, and a Master’s of Social Science in African Studies from The University of Oxford (St Anthony’s). Her academic research has focused on the politics of participatory visual research dynamics from an Applied Anthropology perspective. She is passionate about audience engagement and experimenting with modes of public participation. It is within the context of public participation where she has drawn together her interests in media, anthropology, and socio-political interventions. In 2017, Sydelle and her husband Rowan Pybus co-founded the solar powered mobile cinema non-profit network Sunshine Cinema. Sunshine Cinema celebrates the power of storytelling to inspire communities to drive social change through dialogue and action. They address youth unemployment through their Sunbox Ambassadorship program by training young people to be media facilitators equipping them with a mobile, solar cinema kit called ‘The Sunbox’. The Ambassadors mobilise their communities to spark conversation; promoting active citizenship inspired by the power of African Films. For the past five years Sydelle has been working on a personal photographic project, focusing on white South Africans conceptions of belonging in relation to settler colonial histories entitled Un/Settled - that has been published in the New York Times and publicly exhibited in both New York, the Netherlands, and the Company Gardens in Cape Town where it has garnered a wide range of audience response.