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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