Black Girl Live

The Black Girl Live Fellowship is an accelerator program designed to empower black queer women storytellers in South Africa with resources and business skills that will equip them to become sustainable creative entrepreneurs. 

 

The fellowship produces and commissions experimental, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary stories made by black and queer women storytellers. It is an experimental space – where the creative process meets a business Bootcamp that covers everything from funding models to producing, intellectual property, and more.

 

The fellowship supports poets, playwrights, theatre directors, set designers, costume designers, lighting technicians, and editors while cultivating meaningful artistic connections and exploring how these works can be further expanded to create economic spin-offs and business models for the fellows outside of the program. 

 

Fellows are paired with mentors in their respective disciplines, allowing for knowledge exchange, research, ideation, and network building between the fellow and their mentors. The three-month project consists of one-on-one mentorship, workshops, guest lectures, and the making of new works, which are later showcased to the public and industry professionals. 

 

Manyano Media uses programs like the Black Girl Live fellowship to foster conversations around the value of the intellectual property and how being knowledgeable on entrepreneurship, IP and ownership are currencies of empowerment, too.

 

Manyano Media believes that innovative and impactful theatre is made in collaboration and in spaces that foster learning, experimentation, and access to resources. To create theatre and works that advocate for change and a shift in the narrative as it responds to and reflects the world we live in, creative practitioners need to have structures in place that make it possible to produce and tell stories that shift and challenge representations of the contemporary South African black female on and off stage.