Nadia Davids

DAVIDS, Nadia. (Cape Town, 1977-) Playwright, actress, stage director, journalist and scholar. Having studied drama at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Davids has gone on to become one of the most prominent of young writer-directors and theatre scholars in the country. Besides her work in prose and her journalism, Davids has written and directed seven plays focused primarily on the life of women and families in South Africa, and intimately concerned with and connected to a re-imagining of the aesthetic and political possibilities of the post-apartheid South African landscape. Among them are Khumbula (1995), Doc’s Wife (1999), The Butterfly and the Wog (2000), At her Feet (2002), The Littlest Warrior (2005), and Cissie (2008). Both At her Feet and Cissie have been published, while the best known of works, At her Feet, was nominated for the Noma award for best book published in Africa and has been studied as a set work at schools and universities in South Africa and North America since 2004. Between 2003 and 2004 she wrote a weekly column for the Cape Town based newspaper, The Argus and later she began to write a bi-monthly column for the New York-based publication The Brooklyn Rail. In June 2008, Nadia achieved her PhD in Theatre at the University of Cape Town for a thesis which traces the performative connections between archive, exile, memory and loss through the experience of forced removals under apartheid in District Six. She has received two A.W. Mellon Fellowships for her research and has been made a visiting scholar at University of California at Berkeley (2001) and New York University (NYU, 2004-2006). She has lectured at UCT and NYU. She divides her time between home and New York City. In 2006, she was a finalist in the South Africa Pen Award judged by Nobel Prize laureate J.M. Coetzee for her short story Safe Home. Her work has been produced, published and studied in Africa, Europe and North America and she has been selected as one of ten women playwrights world wide to participate in the Women's Project Playwright’s Lab in New York (2008-2010). Fleur du Cap "Rosalie van der Gught"--2003 At Her Feet. Nominated for best new South African play 2008 -Cissie. http://www.litnet.co.za. (2008-06-17), http://www.nadiadavids.com/ ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Davids

Return to ESAT Personalities D

Return to South African Theatre Personalities

Return to Main Page