Sydelle Willow Smith is a storyteller passionate about media advocacy working across Africa, based in Cape Town, born in Johannesburg. Her love of photography developed at The Market Photo Workshop, which led to a deeper ethnographic enquiry in Visual Anthropology at The University of Cape Town, followed by a Master’s of Social Science in African Studies from The University of Oxford.
Her academic research has focused on the politics of participatory visual research dynamics from an Applied Anthropology perspective. She is passionate about audience engagement and experimenting with modes of public participation. It is within the context of public participation where she has drawn together her interests in media, anthropology, and socio-political interventions. In 2017, Sydelle and her husband Rowan Pybus co-founded the solar powered mobile cinema non-profit network Sunshine Cinema . Sunshine Cinema celebrates the power of storytelling to inspire communities to drive social change through dialogue and action. They address youth unemployment through their Sunbox Ambassadorship program by training young people to be media facilitators equipping them with a mobile, solar cinema kit called ‘The Sunbox’. The Ambassadors mobilise their communities to spark conversation; promoting active citizenship inspired by the power of African Films. For the past five years Sydelle has been working on a personal documentary project, focusing on white South Africans conceptions of belonging in relation to settler colonial histories entitled Un/Settled - that has been published in the New York Times and publicly exhibited in both New York, the Netherlands with World Press Photo, and was part of Infecting The City in the Company Gardens in Cape Town where it has garnered a wide range of audience response. The exhibition is currently installed at the VnA Waterfront in Cape Town and aims to provoke and unpack uncomfortable dialogues about whiteness.
Curriculum Vitae
2020 Atlantic Philanthropies Racial Equity Fellow
2020 Berlinale Mastercard Fellowship for Sunshine Cinema
2019 – Selected for the New York Portfolio Review
2019 World Press Joop Masterclass Nominee
2019 Infecting The City Public Arts Festival
2019 Berlinale Talent Campus – Distributor/Sunshine Cinema
2019 Shortlisted for the Joop Swaart World Press Masterclass
2018 Women in Photography Mentorship
2017 Mail and Guardian Top 200 South African
2017 Group show at SMAC Gallery – Cape Town
2016 Time is Love International Video Art Exhibit
2016 VideoNomad exhibit in Sengal at Dakar Biennale
2014 Gisele Wulfsohn Mentorship Market Photo Workshop
2014 ART54 Funding for Soft Walls on Sea Point Promenade
2013 Africa Center Residency at Jiwar in Barcelona for Making Neighbourhood
2010 Sensational Mix Show with Musa Nxumalo in Rotterdam
Publications
New York Times Lens Blog, New York Times, UC Observer (Canada), Le Monde, 1843 Magazine for The Economist, ADACC, Le Nouvelle Observateur, The Africa Report, Camera Austria, National Geographic Traveller, Redbulletin.
Clients
EDCTP, Orange Mobile, Google, UNICEF, The World Bank, Facebook, Doctors Without Borders, DHL, Travelocity, The Children’s Radio Foundation, Fairtrade, The African Center for Cities, Red Bull.