Search Speakers: Cape Town

Mokena Makeka is principal and founder of Makeka Design Lab. His highlight was being selected among 100 architects globally by Hertzog and de Meuron to be a part of the Ordos 100. He is a two-time recipient of the CIA Award of Merit and a 2010 nominee for the Johnnie Walker Celebrating Strides Awards in Design.

The Cape Town-born Oliver Hermanus started his undergraduate degree in Film, Media and Visual Studies at the University of Cape Town and completed it at the University of California after receiving an exchange programme scholarship.

Born in Cape Town in 1958, political cartoonist and satirist Jonathan Shapiro was detained by security police in 1988, shortly before leaving on a Fulbright Scholarship to study media arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Cape Town-based graffiti artist Faith47 searches for a tone of ink that goes directly to the heart. Her work is a fixation, merging the intimately fragile and most subtle gestures with a raw and violent darkness.

The Handspring Puppet Company was founded in 1981 by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler. Working out of Kalk Bay in Cape Town, the company’s original focus was the creation of new South African plays for children, followed by innovative educational work for TV.

ZA News is the result of a long-term collaboration between political cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro (aka Zapiro), and film and TV producer Thierry Cassuto.

Heath Nash holds a BA in Fine Art (sculpture) from the University of Cape Town. He was the Elle Decoration SA designer and lighting designer of the year in 2005/6, and won the title of British Council South African Creative Entrepreneur of the Year in 2006.

Haldane Martin qualified as an industrial designer at the Cape Tech in 1992, also winning the Style Student Award. From these promising beginnings he moved on to work for Richard Sparks Industrial Design consultancy but, just a year later, branched off on his own to develop furniture and homeware designs.

Crispian Plunkett started off studying at the Art, Ballet, Drama and Music School in Johannesburg. Deciding that he hadn’t quite found his creative niche, he went on to study photography at Durban Institute of Technology and achieved a National Diploma. It was only then that he knew he had found the medium where he could best express his creative impulses.

Architect Luyanda Mpahlwa is principal and director of MMA Architects in Cape Town. Mpahlwa completed his National Architectural Diploma in 1986 while serving a five-year term in Robben Island Prison, before going on to complete a Masters in Architecture at the Technical University of Berlin in 1997.