Phala Ookeditse Phala

An award-winning theater-maker and director whose work has won awards in South Africa, the US, the Czech Republic, and Australia, Phala Ookeditse Phala is the co-director of Noma Yini, a South African arts collective in the business of “storying”— the multiple ways of coming into, portraying, forming, building, making, and performing stories. From 2019 to 2023, he was the animateur at William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea in Maboneng, Johannesburg. He holds a masters degree in dramatic arts from Wits University. Phala’s works champion emotional and psychologically stimulating storytelling as a uniquely African aesthetic. His focus and interest are on methodologies of making and creating work in ways that collapse and disrupt conventional norms.