Tandile Mbatsha

Performance Artist, Educator (South Africa)

Tandile Mbatsha (They/ Them and Theirs) is a South African queer and gender non-binary performance artist, choreographic-activist, educator, speaker, host, producer, model and scholar. They make multimodal performance art work that illuminates imigudu ne mizamo/ efforts of racialised queer people to self-fashion and self-determine. Tandile creates work that emphatically declares the full humanness and citizenship of queer people of colour in Africa as Africans. They have performed at the PERFORMA17 Biennale in New York, in Zoë Modiga’s set at Afropunk, at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and opened for FAKA at the Cape Town Electronic Music Festival, commissioned by the V&A Waterfront for the Artist Alliance Campaign. They produced the film The Solo Ball on the virtual National Arts Festival curated programme. Tandile has also worked with internationally acclaimed artist Zanele Muholi on various projects. Mbatsha, a Master of Arts (MA) in Theatre and Performance (with distinction) from the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town, was selected as part of the top 100 artist entrepreneurs by Business Arts South Africa’s (BASA) for the Debut Programme. Their latest work I AM premiered at the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) Live Art Festival, Tandile featured at the exhibition opening of the Goethe Institut Young Curators Incubator curated by Nkgopoleng Moloi, they co-curate the Digital Soirées at the Performing Arts in Context conference hosted by Zurich University of the Arts and they are currently the Festival Co-Director at the Queer Feminist Film Festival.