Katleho Shoro

Katleho Kano Shoro is a published performance poet, a scholar and project manager within the arts.

Shoro received her Master’s in Social Science degree, cum laude, under the supervision of Carolyn Hamilton at the University of Cape Town (2014). For her coursework component, Social Anthropology and African Studies were her core subjects. Her dissertation, "Terms of Engaging and Project-ing Africa(ns): An ethnographic encounter with African Studies through Curate Africa", was an exploration of the projections, intellectual tensions and conceptions of “Africa” within the university space.

Shoro’s scholarship focuses largely on knowledge production centred on Africa and what it means to be Pan-African and an intellectual particularly through the lens of creative arts. Examples of these explorations can be found in the papers she has co-written with Francis Nyamnjoh: “Testing the Waters of African Renaissance in Post-Apartheid South Africa” in State of the Nation 2014 (HSRC) as well as “Language, mobility, African writers and Pan-Africanism” in African Communication Research, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2011).
 

Shoro is the author of Serurubele – her debut collection of poetry (Modjaji Books, 2017). Her poetry has also been published in journals internationally. She continues to perform within and beyond South Africa as well as participate in literary festivals and projects – some which have come in the form of exhibitions and experiments. Her work in the arts extends to research, facilitating workshops and managing projects - particularly in African film and literature. Overall, Shoro seeks to locate and create (publically-accessible) spaces in which academia and the arts interrogate and advance Sesotho, botho and Pan-Africanism, together. To this end, Shoro has co-edited The Spoken Word Project: Stories Travelling through Africa (Goethe Institute SA, 2015). In 2017 she co-curated the exhibition "Overtime: representations, values and imagined futures of ‘classical African Art’" - and co-edited the accompanying publication with the same title - within her tenure as Research Associate at Wits Art Museum. Furthermore, she worked as the project manager at the African Arts Institute (AFAI) where she coordinated AFAI's monthly African film screenings, African literature discussions and public art interventions where art was used to promote and defend human rights and democracy in South Africa.