The University of Johannesburg is proud to announce the fifth cohort of artists selected for the UJ Artists in Residence 2026 programme.
The programme is designed to foster research through artistic practice, tasking artists to complete at least one creative output project within a 12- or 24-month period, meeting the Department of Higher Education’s standards for creative output.
In 2025, the UJ Artists in Residence Programme issued its fifth call for submissions, and artists around the globe expressed keen interest in the programme. From the pool of applicants, eight outstanding artist researchers were chosen for 2026.
“In a country as dynamic and multifaceted as ours, arts practice research is essential in promoting dialogue, celebrating identity, and driving inclusive social transformation.By exploring new forms of expression, understanding, and creativity, it fosters deeper connections between diverse communities and bodies of knowledge. Arts practice not only enriches our cultural heritage but also addresses contemporary issues, offering innovative responses to societal conflicts and challenges,” says Pieter Jacobs, Head of UJ Arts & Culture.
The University of Johannesburg Artists in Residence Programme aims to advance arts practice as research in one or a combination of Visual Arts and Fine Arts, Music, Theatre, Performance and Dance, Design, Film and Television, and Literary Arts.
The selected artists are as follows:
Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe
Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe is a choreographer, performer and educator now based in France, with roots in Diepkloof, Soweto. His formative years were steeped in the dance and drumming practices of his grandmother, mother, aunts and other family members who served as Sangomas, or traditional Zulu healers. In 1990, he was accepted into the inaugural trainee programme at Moving Into Dance Mophatong (MID), where he evolved from “punk with a perm” into a dedicated student of formal dance training under Sylvia Glasser.
Mantsoe’s work blends African dance traditions with techniques acquired through international residencies, including with NAISDA in Australia. His choreographic practice emphasises spiritual qualities accessible through deep bodily engagement, transcending limiting binaries of contemporary versus traditional or Western versus African dance. For over thirty years, he has garnered national and international accolades, with award-winning choreographic contributions showcased worldwide.
His residency project, Mpeyane’s Dream/Ipupo, extends his three-decade-long investigation into pedagogical approaches derived from Sangoma ritualistic practices. The work draws inspiration from his original solo Mpeyane and its second iteration, Behold Ipupo/Mpeyane’s Dream, exploring how ancestral knowledge embedded in dance can be incorporated into contemporary choreographic practice.
Ashraf Jamal
Dr Ashraf Jamal is a writer and scholar based in Johannesburg. Educated at schools in South Africa, India, Swaziland and England, he holds degrees from the universities of Sussex, New Brunswick, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Natal. He has taught Comparative Literature, Drama, Anthropology and Art History at multiple South African universities including Cape Town, Natal, Stellenbosch and Rhodes. He is currently a Senior Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg.
Dr Ashraf Jamal is a writer and scholar based in Johannesburg. Educated at schools in South Africa, India, Swaziland and England, he holds degrees from the universities of Sussex, New Brunswick, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Natal. He has taught Comparative Literature, Drama, Anthropology and Art History at multiple South African universities including Cape Town, Natal, Stellenbosch and Rhodes. He is currently a Senior Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg.
Jamal is the author of numerous artist monographs, plays, film scripts and books, including The Shades (winner of the Sanlam Prize), Love themes for the wilderness (shortlisted for the MNET Prize), Predicaments of culture in South Africa, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, Strange Cargo: Essays on Art, and African Art: The ARAK Collection.
His residency project, International Bastard, is a memoir in auto-fiction form. The work tracks key points in a global upbringing, examining identity and its brokerage in the world through frameworks of cosmopolitanism, nomadism, perspectivism, deconstruction and hybridity. Structurally resembling a picaresque narrative, the book interrogates what narrative is, what a life is, and how one moves forward when every moment is a qualification.
Tony Bonani Miyambo
Tony Bonani Miyambo is a Johannesburg-based theatre-maker, actor and producer. A graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Dramatic Arts program, he has established himself as a dynamic force within the South African and international arts landscape. His award-winning solo performances, including Kafka’s Ape, The Cenotaph of Dan Wa Moriri and Commission Continua have toured extensively and garnered critical acclaim for their emotional intensity, socio-political relevance and formal innovation.
As Co-Director of Noma Yini, a creative production company committed to bold independent storytelling, Miyambo champions work rooted in African experiences while speaking to global audiences. His practice is driven by a deep commitment to socially engaged theatre and a belief in the transformative power of live performance.
His residency project, Cowboy, is a new theatrical work exploring what happens when a Black South African patient receives a corneal transplant from a white American cowboy. The work unpacks themes of medical trauma, racial memory, and postcolonial inheritance, where the body becomes a battlefield for history, identity, and resistance. Developed alongside practice-led research into fringe theatre-making in South Africa, the project investigates how independent artists navigate sustainability, visibility and artistic integrity outside mainstream institutions.
Gavin Krastin
Gavin Krastin is a South African performance artist, educator and curator based in Pretoria. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Performance Studies and works at the intersection of live art, interdisciplinary performance and site-responsive practices. He was a Theaterformen Fellow in 2016, a two-time awardee of Pro Helvetia Residencies, and in 2019 formed part of a group exhibition that represented South Africa at the Prague Quadrennial.
In 2021, he received the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art and in 2023 received the Best Curator Award at the annual Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Awards Ceremony. In 2023, the Presidency’s Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities honoured him with a Forty under 40 Award.
As the founder of the Live Art Arcade, a nomadic exhibition platform for early- and mid-career artists, he assists in providing space, visibility and support for new site-responsive and durational works. His practice explores the body’s presence and agency in alternative spaces, interrogating how bodies transgress and disrupt environments that seek to govern them.
His residency project, Errant Flesh, is a live art performance and creative research enquiry that seeks to re-member and reanimate the mythic figure of Sir Gawain. Through this medieval avatar, Krastin excavates the Celtic and medieval lineage embedded in his own name, revealing how even ostensibly neutral white South African names carry cultural charge and layered historical meaning. The work stages identity not as fixed truth but as dynamic, interrogative process.
Noa Mori Machover
Noa Mori Machover is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and researcher based in Philadelphia, completing dual master’s degrees in fine arts and landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Their practice explores entanglements of ecology, technology and diaspora, listening for submerged narratives in familiar materials and landscapes.
Their residency project investigates the global circulation of platinum, focused on South Africa’s North West province which houses over 70% of world platinum reserves.
Through site-based, material and social research, they will produce multi-channel video works, sculptures and diagrammatic prints tracing environments, communities and practices from mine shafts to city streets. The work asks how legal, logistical, and social infrastructures enable or disrupt flows of critical minerals, and how such flows inscribe themselves onto bodies, landscapes and global imaginaries.
Henrietta Scholtz
Henrietta Scholtz is an interdisciplinary artist based at Bag Factory Artist Studios in Johannesburg. Her work uses the practice of bio-based pigment making as a metaphor for our collaborative relationship with nature, examining how intersections between ancient and modern technologies influence society’s psychological development. She holds a BA (Hons) Communications Management and BA English Literature, and is currently completing the final semester of a remote Master’s in Arts Research (Hybrid Arts).
Her interests lie in ontological hybridisation, post-anthropocentric ethics and meta-material metaphysics, with a material arts process practice based in bio-based pigment extraction and biological material symbols.
Her residency project, Planetary Cognitive Ecology: Eco-Digital Narratives, focuses on the transdisciplinary space of bio-based materiality, AI technologies and XR futures. Bio-based pigments function as boundary objects between nature and technology, creating speculative virtual worlds that explore how technologies can evolve alongside and in dialogue with the natural world.
Nomakhwezi Becker
Nomakhwezi Becker is a South African-German interdisciplinary performer, writer and facilitator based in London. She holds an Honours degree in Drama and Performance Studies with distinction from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and an MA in Performance and Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her theatre work When Coasts Meet won a National Arts Festival Ovation Award in 2019, and she has performed internationally at Poetry Africa, Southbank Centre, FUSE Festival, Westminster Abbey and Translationale Berlin. She is a two-time Barbican Young Poet and Mili Dueli Grand Finalist.
Her residency project, To Live on the Tongue, is an interdisciplinary poetry research collection rooted in Call and Response from South African storytelling practices. Working across English, isiZulu, isiXhosa and German, the collection treats the page as textile and the poem as performance score, investigating diasporic memory through the material cultures of Southern African beadwork and Blaudruck/isiShweshwe textiles.
Nonofo Naledi Bogacwi
Nonofo Naledi Bogacwi is an accomplished and visionary film producer, writer, and director, whose journey in the world of film is rooted in a rich foundation of artistic education. Her career was shaped by formative experiences at Mmabana Cultural Centre in Taung and the prestigious National School of the Arts, where she not only honed her creative talents but also served as the President of the Student Representative Council. Naledi’s academic journey continued at Tshwane University of Technology, where she earned an Honours Degree in Motion Picture Production.
Her strong academic credentials and profound artistic knowledge have seen her ascend to key roles in the education sector, where she has contributed significantly as Head of the Film Department at City Varsity Johannesburg and as a Screenwriting lecturer at both AFDA and TUT. Naledi’s influence extends beyond the classroom, as she has produced three short films, including her debut project, where she collaborated with industry heavyweights like Sello Maake KaNcube and Luthuli Dlamini.
As an award-winning producer and writer, Naledi’s work has earned her widespread recognition. Her residency project, Miss Guru Nation, is an eight-part television drama series addressing youth issues in Kwa-Guqa township, Mpumalanga. Through participatory action research and entertainment-education methodologies, the project models how scripted television drama can serve as catalyst for social change while offering professional training opportunities for UJ Screen Studies students.
About UJ Arts & Culture
UJ Arts & Culture, a division of the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture (FADA) produces and presents world-class student and professional arts programmes aligned to the UJ vision of an international university of choice, anchored in Africa, dynamically shaping the future. A robust range of arts platforms are offered on all four UJ campuses for students, staff, alumni, and the general public to experience and engage with emerging and established Pan-African and international artists drawn from the full spectrum of the arts.
In addition to UJ Arts & Culture, FADA (www.uj.ac.za/fada) offers programmes in eight creative disciplines, in Art, Design and Architecture, as well as playing home to the NRF SARChI Chair in South African Art & Visual Culture, and the Visual Identities in Art & Design Research Centre. The Faculty has a strong focus on sustainability and relevance, and engages actively with the dynamism, creativity, and diversity of Johannesburg in imagining new approaches to art and design education.