Jay Pather

Jay Pather is a choreographer, multi-media artist, curator, writer and teacher. He is Professor at the University of Cape Town where he directs the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA). He is curator for the Infecting the City Festival; the ICA Live Art Festival, the AfrovibesFestival (The Netherlands); Spier Light Art (Cape Town), co-curated the Africa 2020/21 Season (France); and has curated Live Art for Zeitz MOCAA and the Spielart Festival. 

His artistic work deploys site-specific, interdisciplinary and intercultural strategies to frame postcolonial imaginaries, decolonization and matters of social justice. His artistic work has been written about by academics such as Catherine Cole and Ketu Katrak, who recently published the book Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa. Pather’s publications include articles in New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Performance in Post-apartheid South Africa edited my Marc Meaufort; Rogue Urbanism edited by Edgar Pieterse and Abdul Malik Simone; Performing Cities edited by Nicholas Whybrow, Where Strangers Meet; Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm, a book, Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa and for the Theater Journal. He serves as a juror for the TURN Fonds, and Board member of the National Arts Festival of South Africa. He has been appointed Fellow at Queen Mary’s College, University of London and made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2022 he was awarded a Villa Albertine residency in New York City to create his new work, surface tension.