Who is Zayd Minty
Zayd Minty is a cultural planner and researcher based in Cape Town South Africa. He is currently employed at the municipality of the City of Cape Town, heading up its Arts and Culture department. He was previously at Cape Town Partnership, an urban facilitation NGO, where he headed up The Fringe: Cape Town’s Design and Innovation District. He was the first co-ordinator of Creative Cape Town.
Through Creative Cape Town, Zayd incubated and drove the early stages of such initiatives as Cape Town’s winning bid to be World Design Capital 2014; The Fringe: Cape Town’s Design and Innovation District; The Imagine City Hall Campaign; and the Cape Town Design Network. Creative Cape Town produced an influential Annual, hosts a crowd sourced festival called Creative Week Cape Town and was instrumental in attracting the prestiigous communications awards ceremony The Loerie Awards to Cape Town.
He has worked at a senior level in a range of cultural institutions including the District Six Museum (2003 – 2005), Robben Island Museum (1997-98) and The Community Arts Project. He has served on a number of high profile boards and currently sits on a boards of The Magnet Theatre Company and the Gold of Africa Museum.
Through his independent curatorial and production practise, ONE, he curated a number of significant contemporary art projects, festivals, dialogic forums and conferences. These include: A Place Called Home (2004), BLAC (1998 – 2003), Returning the Gaze (2000), Liberating Zones (2003), The VANSA Conference on visual arts: Transformation | Growth | Opportunity (2006) and the Cape Town Festival 2000 and 2002.
As a researcher and writer he has written for a number of publications and for the Isandla Institute – an urban studies think tank. He produced a discussion document for the organisation on cultural diversity in Cape Town entitled Culture and the Right to the City: Diversity in the Cultural Ecology of Cape Town. He was a Rockefeller research fellow at Emory University, Atlanta, in the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship. He is currently registered for postgraduate study at the University of Cape Town with a thesis focussing on the Newtown Cultural Precinct.
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