Jay Pather

Jay Pather is a performance theorist, choreographer and curator. He is Professor at the University of Cape Town and director of Institute for Creative Arts (ICA). His artistic work deploys site-specific, interdisciplinary and intercultural strategies to frame postcolonial imaginaries, decoloniality and matters of social justice. He is curator for Infecting the City Public Art Festival; the ICA Live Art Festival and the Afrovibes Festival (The Netherlands), co-curated Season Africa 2020/21 (France); Body, Image Movement (Madrid), Spier Light Art  (Cape Town), for Zeitz MOCAA and the Spielart Festival (Munich). 

For ICA, Pather has created Fellowships, a Postgraduate (Masters and PhD) Programme in Live and Public Art, public lecture programmes and interdisciplinary events. Recent publications include articles in New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Performance in Post-apartheid South Africa; Changing Metropolis ll edited by Marie Polli; 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 and a book, Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa. He is currently working on a new book Restless Infections, Public Art in South Africa. 

Recent addresses include for Independent Curators International in New York City, New Orleans and Accra, Sommerakademie in Venice, for University of Bergen’s International Curator’s Forum in Nairobi, International Conference on African Cultures in Harare and at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. He served on the panel of jurors for the International Award for Public Art Prize and on the Board of the National Arts Festival of South Africa. He has been appointed Fellow at University of London and was just  awarded Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.