mpho works across disciplines of film, music, and art. With a scholarly practice that cuts across Sociology, Environmental Humanities, Management and Organisations, and Literary Studies.
Interdisciplinary Scholar | Strategist | Cultural Worker
Born in Kimberley, the Northern Cape, and raised in the north of the Free State, mpho is a writer, producer, and interdisciplinary scholar living between Johannesburg and Cape Town, where his intellectual project is preoccupied with ecology, culture, institutions, and black life. Thinking primarily via the fields of Black Studies, Critical Queer Studies, Migration Studies, Environmental Humanities, Sociology, and Management and Organisational Studies, mpho insists on assembling tools from elsewhere places, to be unbounded and lead with curiosity.
Education & crossdisciplinary training
He holds an MPhil in Environmental Humanities (UCT), where his dissertation examined antiblackness and the figure of the dog in colonial South Africa, thinking via the fields of Animal Studies and creative non-fiction; an MA in sociology, which he completed at Wits University, examining migration, Critical Food Studies, and the governance of the COVID-19 pandemic. mpho also holds an MPhil in Business Management, specialising in Change Leadership (GIBS, University of Pretoria), where he researched Cultural and Creative Industries, black improvised music, and the business models that shape black music in Cape Town and Johannesburg. He is currently reading for his doctoral degree at the UCT Graduate School of Business (Business Administration), researching climate finance and the governance of the commons in southern Africa.
Selected recognition + Fellowships
mpho is the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans (2018), Mellon Fellow (2018), Open Society Foundation for South Africa Scholar (2020), and Science for Africa Foundation/Critical Zones Africa Fellow (2023-2025)
Practice
Film + Culture + Society
mpho’s producer credits include Generation Change (2021), an Al Jazeera documentary on youth mobilisation, gender, and climate repair, as well as The Hour After Midnight (2020 - 2026), a documentary film on the life and death of anti-apartheid labour organiser Dr. Niel Aggett. He hosted and produced Free Media Free Minds (2018 - 2019) on Cape Town TV, having majored in Media Studies and International Relations in his undergraduate studies at Wits. His nonfiction writing has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, Africa Is a Country, The Johannesburg Review of Books, among other publications.
Institutional Design + Creative Business Strategy
Together with sound engineer and producer Elu Eboka of EBK Studio, he co-founded HEAVY KATS: A Black Studies Programme, a collaboration-led music platform focused on cultural preservation in jazz and experimental sound, art criticism, and the circulation of black music in Africa and its diasporas. HK expands his interest in change, strategy, institutions, and cultural production in the aftermath of colonial violence in the modern world. He is also the founder of BLK, an independent creative strategy lab plotting at the intersections of artist management, brand narrative design, and research.
Research + Writing + Teaching
mpho is a researcher and lecturer with teaching experience at the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, AFDA, and CIEE Cape Town, where he has taught environmental politics, visual culture, film studies, and sociology. His scholarly practice is invested in rethinking pedagogy, methods, and critical questions around dispossession, affect, and subjectivity.
Brand Design + Content Strategy + Impact Storytelling
mpho has an extensive background in communications and brand strategy, with past work experience as director of communications at the University of Cape Town’s Environmental Humanities South and the Critical Zones Africa consortium, funded by the Science for Africa Foundation, and as a senior communications specialist and brand strategy coach at the African Research Funding Accelerator and Wonder & Co, where he served clients in higher education. He consults on content strategy, web design and management, brand narrative, and impact storytelling in the arts, higher education research, and the NGO sector.