Ian Bruce

(19*-) Actor, director, playwtright and manager. Trained as an actor in Johannesburg and appeared briefly in the early nineteen seventies on the SA stage and in early SABC TV productions. During a long political exile in Holland he co-founded the Tekhwini Theatre Foundation (NATA) with Anthony Akerman and Joseph Mosikili, and began writing plays. After his return to South Africa in the early nineteen nineties Ian won a Radio SA award for his play, Kept in Mind. In 1998, he began working with the New Africa Theatre Association for which he and his wife, Ina Bruce (néé Ina Vermeulen), created a host of productions, educational plays, and Industrial Theatre works. He later became the executive director of NATA. As playwright he has produced, among others, And Falls The Shadow, (his first play, produced in Holland, winning a Dutch Arts Council best new play award), My Father's House, (only work at the time to evade South Africa's censorship laws, PACT, 1989, directed by Francois Swart), and Groundswell (New Africa Theatre, 2006)