Koleka Putuma

Koleka Putuma (Early Years Company) is a Performance Poet, Facilitator and Theatre Practitioner who graduated with a BA in Theatre & Performance at UCT. Her work has travelled to Scotland, New York and around South Africa. She has been featured on BBC Radio 4, BBC focus on Africa, Badilisha Poetry X-Change and TedX Cape Town Women. In 2014 she was nominated and voted to represent the Western Cape at the Slam For Your Life competition at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, where she was crowned South Africa’s First National Slam Champion. During her time at UCT she directed An Endless Echo (2013), For God’s Sake (2014), an adaptation of Chimamanda Adichie’s ‘Miracle’, Mbuzeni (2014) and UHM (2014) which was awarded Best Student Writing at the NAF Student Festival in Grahamstown and showcased at the Artscape Theatre in December 2014. She has been nominated for the Rosalie van der Gucht Prize for New Directors at the 2015 Fleur Du Cap Theatre Awards. She has headlined at SliPnet’s Inzync Poetry Sessions, Word N Sound Poetry and Live Music Series and at Off The Wall. She is a resident poet of the collective Lingua Franca and Co-Founder of newly formed theatre companies Velvet Spine and The Papercut Collective