Who is Zayd Minty
Zayd Minty is a cultural planner and researcher based in Cape Town South Africa. He is currently employed at the Cape Town Partnership, an urban facilitation NGO, heading up The Fringe: Cape Town’s Design and Innovation District. The Fringe is a developing initiative and a Cape Town World Design Capital 2014 bid book project. 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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