It’s a celebration of young and old, experience and innovation, but more than anything, artists that have paved the way brilliantly and those whose entry into the artistic world has been exciting.
The Arts & Culture Trust announced the 2013 winners of the ACT Lifetime Achievement Awards and ImpACT Awards for Young Professionals in Joburg recently.
The ACT Lifetime Achievement Awards – presented for theatre, music, visual art and literature – honour arts professionals whose extraordinary careers have had a profound and lasting impact on arts, culture and heritage, and whose lifetime achievements have contributed significantly to the enrichment of cultural life in South Africa.
This year, the honours went to Elsa Joubert, for Literature; Professor Pitika Ntuli, for Visual Arts; Sandra Prinsloo, for Theatre; and Latozi Madosini, for Music.
The ImpACT Awards for Young Professionals aim to honour young artists who have achieved significant professional standing in their chosen discipline, and are in the first five years of their professional careers.
After a public nominations process, the following awards were announced for this year: Poorvi Bhana, for Design; Motlatji Ditodi, for Theatre; Camron Andrews, for Music and Singing; and Blessing Ngobeni, for Visual Arts.
And because they’re not known to all, here’s a short introduction to each of them:
• Blessing Ngobeni was arrested for armed robbery at the age of 15 and spent close to six years in prison. Here, with the help of warders and friends who brought him art materials, he began to pursue his art seriously.
He has exhibited in several group exhibitions, and was the first prize and gold award winner at the Gala Ex-Offenders Awards. Ngobeni also won an award at the Reinhold Cassirer Ward last year.
• Since graduating with an MTech in Fine Arts from the Tshwane University of Technology, Poorvi Bhana has featured prominently in exhibitions, both as an exhibitor and a curator. Bhana was selected as a finalist at the Sasol New Signatures Art Competition (2009) and awarded a merit prize, later winning first prize for the piece at the Thami Mnyele Fine Art Competition.
• Winner for Theatre, Motlatji Ditodi’s professional credits include The Secret Garden, The Boys in the Photograph, The Crucible and The Miser, for which she received a Naledi Theatre Award nomination last year for Best Breakthrough Performance by a Newcomer. Television credits include Askies/Zulu For Sale, Zone 14, and Lokshin Bioscope: 2020 Orlando East.
• Instrumentalist, teacher, arranger and composer Camron Andrews received the music award.
He received his BMus degree from Wits University and has worked in a range of musical settings, including the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, the Johannesburg Festival Orchestra and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra, with the likes of Richard Cock and Bryan Schimmel. – Tonight Reporter