Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose
Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where he is concurrently pursuing an Open MA in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. His work spans artistic and curatorial practice, film programming, cultural theory, and critical theory, with a focus on the visual cultures of modernism across art history, theatre and performance studies, film, and media studies. Prior to joining Brown, he worked at the Iziko South African National Gallery as an Andrew Mellon Fellow.
Nyawose's fellowships and awards include the Brown University Open Graduate Education Fellowship in History of Art and Architecture (2026), the Pembroke Center Research Development Grant (2025–26), the Edward Guiliano ’72 Global Graduate Fellowship (2025), the Institute for Creative Arts Live Art Festival Curatorial Fellowship (2021–22), and the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg and Wits School of Arts Young Curators Incubator Fellowship (2022). He was also selected for the TURN2 Curatorial Residency Programme at ZK/U, Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (2022).
Nyawose is the recipient of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Award for Best Creative Collections: Emerging Artist/Curator (2025). His publications include eBhish’ (2024), an anthology he produced and edited for Archive Books. He was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award (2022) and received the Hariban Award, Juror's Choice (2022).
Curatorial Statement
My curatorial approach begins with the open call as a collective process of critical attunement. The festival’s curatorial direction emerges from the propositions, urgencies and formal experiments of artists working across South Africa, the continent and the wider world. Working closely with the curatorial team, I am interested in shaping these distinct voices into a programme attentive to the social, historical and spatial conditions of its presentation, to the encounter and the expanded possibilities of live art, from performance and ritual to installation, moving image and public intervention. Drawing on my experience in curatorial practice, performance studies, and collaborative programming, I approach the festival as a responsive structure through which works enter into dialogue with one another, with their sites and with their publics.
Themba Stewart
Themba is immersed in technical production with a strong creative focus. He is a theatre maker, curator, lighting and installation artist, designer, builder, teacher, technical, tour and production manager. As an artist, Themba is interested in installation as narrative, using technical aspects to tell a story. He has a particular interest in site specific, interdisciplinary and performance art work - having spent years facilitating and actualising many public arts festivals and symposiums under the guidance of Jay Pather.
In 2023, Themba co-curated the ‘Infecting the City’ (ITC) festival, a large site specific interdisciplinary festival in and around Cape Town City centre. Themba has a long standing relationship with ICA (previously GIPCA), starting as part of the creative team for the first ITC in 2008, with his involvement building over the years as a performer, artist, production and technical manager; culminating in co-curating the festival in 2023. As a production manager for GIPCA, he ran the first Live Arts festival in 2012.
As an artist, his installation work includes Spier light art installations (2020,2024 & 2026), performance art work with Tracey Rose (2022) and William Kentridge's symposium (2019); both at Zeitz MOCAA and site specific work for Infecting the City (2008, 2011, 2014).
Themba has designed lighting and set for multiple shows – including ongoing work with Magnet Theatre, Mud and fire parables, Jay Pather & Qondiswa James.
He has been nominated thrice (in collaboration with Mark Fleishman) for ‘Best Lighting Design’ in the 2022/2024/2025 Fleur du Cap awards for Magnet Theatre’s ‘Snapped’; ‘Oedipus#aftersophocles’ & ‘Mange Manje’. In 2023, Themba was nominated for ‘Best Set Design’ in the Fleur du Cap awards for his work on Carlo Daniel’s ‘No complaints: new day, new dawn’.
Recently Themba designed the set and lights for Iman Isaacs and Raezeen Wentworth’s ‘Law of Carnage’ at the Baxter Theatre, for Buhle T. Sefane’s ‘Uhambo’ at Magnet Theatre and for Qondiswa James’s ‘Amaxelegu’ (2024) and Mike Van Graan’s ‘The good white’ (2025) at Market theatre in Joburg.
As a director, Themba wrote and directed Red Aloes, originally performed at Magnet Theatre (2017) and reimagined as a site specific work for the Zietz MOCAA (2019).
Themba currently works as a Production Manager for Magnet theatre and previously has run shows for multiple companies, site specific venues and festivals in the country and internationally (including Magnet Theatre, Siwela Sonke, Infecting the City, Live Arts Festival, Edinburgh Festival, Assitej international festivals, BAM - NYC).
Curatorial Statement
Our curation process this year begins in response to the pertinent question - What is Live Art?
Our job is not to curtail the responses, tackled through the artists’ applications, but rather to tap into a collective undercurrent that rises from these responses.
We look to find the thematic threads that weave the immediacy of live, responsive, interdisciplinary artworks to one another and their desire to interact with diverse publics through deliberate and incidental exchange with the city, as reflected by the artists living social, spatial and historical commentary.
Lending from my personal experience, facilitating multiple iterations of ICA’s interdisciplinary offerings of site specific and performance art work in and around Cape Town, we strive to engender a further palimpsest of images, emotions and encounters throughout the city. To give audiences a variety of experiences of public spaces and collaborative works by coming into contact with this breadth of artistic offerings; from the bold and evocative to the subtle and affecting.