Ukhona Ntsali Mlandu
Ukhona Ntsali Mlandu is the director of Greatmore Studios in Cape Town and founder and head curator of makwande.republic in the Goshen Village, Eastern Cape.
She has curated a number of festivals, programmes and public art interventions including the public art live installation #100AfricanReads.
Mlandu has a special interest in the politics of public space and place-making, spatial and gender justice, heritage and memory . She also curated a 40th commemoration of June 16 at the Castle of Goodhope, Cape Town and the Cornerstone Institute Festival of Learning.
She was part of a research team that developed a Cultural Planning Toolkit Framework with Delve and Associates for the City of Cape Town. Mlandu has the Artscape Theatre, Cape Town and the Performing Arts Network of South Africa (PANSA).
Mlandu completed a three-year arts management fellowship with the Devos Institute of Arts Management formerly at the Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts, currently at the University of Maryland, USA. She was also awarded the International Society for Performing Arts Emerging Leader Fellowship in 2012.
As an artist, Mlandu was one of 14 artists in residence for Open Lab 18 a programme of The Program for Innovation in Artform Development (PIAD) at the University the Free State in collaboration with Modern Arts Projects South Africa where she developed a public art intervention called ukuzibuyisa: giving myself back to myself.
She has contributed to the M/Other artists blog as well as part of the inaugural cohort of Parent Artist Residence at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado. At this residency together with two other artists they shot a documentary called All of Me directed by Maria Velasco on artist who are parents. She was also finalist for the Birthrites Collective.
Mlandu insists on creating work with her children and or finding spaces that are deliberate about acknowledging her role as her mother as an act of survival and resistance against an art world and world of work that invisibilises this aspects of one’s identity and the labour associated with it.