Adeyemi S. Adebayo is a visual artist and curator born in Osun, Nigeria. He holds an undergraduate degree in Agriculture and an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Massachusetts. As a curator, his interest lies in new forms of expression of African modernity, particularly how contemporary continental and postcolonial diasporic African artists continue to engage and negotiate traditional and modern identities.

Desire Aine is a Uganda-based curator, writer, and cultural practitioner working at the intersection of care, sustainability, and non-extractive cultural practice. Her work explores invisible labour, womanhood, cultural memory, material knowledge, and alternative economies of care within Global South contexts.

Through exhibitions, research, writing, and community-centred formats, she examines how everyday practices such as craft-making,storytelling, gathering, and other forms of often overlooked practices function as living systems of knowledge, memory, and collective care. Her curatorial approach foregrounds relational processes, collective authorship, and situated knowledge, with a particular interestin questions of recognition, representation, and whose knowledge is valued in contemporary cultural discourse.

She is the founder of SaAsi Society, a platform exploring care-basedcultural production and community knowledge systems.

(Owethu) Kholofelo Tema is a candidate architectural technologist and cultural worker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Architectural Studies (Honours) at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Working across architecture and contemporary art, Tema has developed a diverse professional background spanning art fairs, project spaces, online art platforms and commercial galleries. These experiences have informed an emergent curatorial practice situated at the intersection of the built environment, urbanism and contemporary visual culture.

His curatorial practice explores the relationships between the built environment, space, place-making and ecological transformation. Through exhibitions, he investigates how histories of extraction, materiality and urban development continue to shape contemporary spatial and social realities.

Lucy B. Kebirungi is a cultural journalist whose practice is rooted in documenting Black history and preserving cross-cultural practices. Throughout their career, Lucy has been interested in creating work that contests dominant narratives while creating avenues for decolonial conversations across generations and geographies. They are especially drawn to the ways exhibitions can connect historical records and oral traditions within Afrodiasporic cultures to contemporary cultural production. 

As an emerging curator, Lucy is developing a practice centred on Afrodiasporic art and the relationships between migration, identity, memory and belonging. They are interested in curating projects that foreground undocumented stories, foster cross-cultural dialogue, and position archives as sites of interest rather than static repositories of the past. Through this residency, Lucy hopes to expand their curatorial methodologies, deepen their research practice, and develop exhibitions and public programmes that connect artists, communities, and audiences through critical, historically grounded storytelling.

Mawadah Nofal is an Egyptian curator, writer and artist working at the intersection of decolonial museology, pan-African cultural imaginaries, and space-making. She is currently a fellow at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, focusing on art education and the relationship between institutions and the publics they claim to serve. 

She has worked with institutions including the Radical Ecologies, Mosaic Rooms, the Horniman Museum, and the Cairo Art Book Fair. Her critical writing has appeared in Dazed MENA, Kohllective, Rusted Radishes, and ICON MENA, among others. Mawadah holds an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford. 

Naledi "Create" Tsotetsi is a South African curator, filmmaker, and cultural producer whose practice explores the intersections of contemporary visual art, storytelling, and community engagement. As a self-taught curator, Naledi develops exhibitions and public programmes that create accessible spaces for dialogue around identity, memory, social justice, and collective imagination.

They are the founder and curator of Freedom Writes, an interdisciplinary exhibition platform that brings together emerging and established artists. Through their curatorial practice, Naledi is committed to amplifying underrepresented voices and creating thoughtful encounters between artists, audiences, and place.

Oratile Mosimanekgosi is a Johannesburg-based writer and researcher. Although formally trained in studio practice, writing forms the foundation of their work.

Their research focuses on care, institutional accountability, and the ethics of cultural practice. Exploring how art institutions shape the ways artists, artworks, and audiences encounter one another.

They approach exhibition-making as an extension of their writing practice, using it as a space to develop and test ideas beyond paper. She holds an Honours degree from the University of Johannesburg and has contributed to the visual arts sector through their work across many artists, galleries, and art institutions.

Shana Ellappa is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and researcher based in Cape Town. Her practice moves between visual art, life writing, and memory work, exploring personal and collective histories through acts of reclamation. Grounded in storytelling as both method and material, she constructs counter-archives that centre lived experience and familial memory. Drawing on oral histories and embodied knowledge, her work translates these narratives into visual forms through recurring symbolic languages. Informed by African feminisms, postcolonial theory, and autoethnography, Ellappa’s practice interrogates the intersections of identity, history, and belonging. She holds a Master’s degree in Art from Rhodes University.

Timika Sukhai is a South African-born writer and curator whose work centres on archival histories, Indigenous knowledge systems, and creative storytelling. She holds an MA in English and History from the University of Dundee, where her research focused on postcolonial narratives, displacement, and the politics of memory. Her practice considers the archive as a site of negotiation, questioning how colonial systems of knowledge have shaped historical narratives and representations of Indigenous and marginalised communities. Through research, writing, and curatorial projects, she develops approaches that bring historical material into dialogue with contemporary perspectives, with particular attention to ethics, care, and community-led knowledge.

Ugonna Ibekwe is a Nigerian curator, art historian, and artist currently pursuing a Master's degree in Art History at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He serves as the volunteer curator of the Obiora Udechukwu Gallery and has previously contributed to curatorial projects at the Institute of African Studies Museum, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His curatorial experience also includes independent exhibition projects at Kó Art Space, Lagos.

His research and curatorial practice explore contemporary African art through material culture, exhibition-making, and indigenous knowledge systems, with particular interest in the experimental legacy of the Nsukka School. Working across exhibitions, writing, and artistic practice, he investigates how artists transform materials and cultural histories into new forms of knowledge and public dialogue.

Through his work, Ibekwe seeks to develop exhibitions that connect artists, institutions, and audiences while contributing to critical conversations on contemporary African art and culture, museum practice, and curatorial methodologies across the African continent.