Dada Khanyisa was born in Umzimkhulu in 1991 and lives in Cape Town. They completed a Bachelor of Fine Art degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2016, after studying Traditional and Digital Animation at the National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa.
Bambi’phone, the first solo exhibition by the artist, took place at Stevenson in Cape Town in 2018, and their sophomore presentation, Good Feelings, took place in Johannesburg in 2020. They have participated in group shows including 021 – 2021, Stevenson, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2021); My whole body changed into something else, Stevenson, Cape Town (2021); HI-STORYTELLING at Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg (2021); Mixed Company at Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2021); Heroes: Principles of African Greatness at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC (2019); 9 More Weeks and Both, and at Stevenson, Johannesburg (2018); among others at galleries across the country. In 2017 Khanyisa produced Afropolitan Tea Party, a mural at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, commissioned to give the historic site contemporary appeal.
Khanyisa won the Simon Gerson Prize at UCT in 2016. As a merit winner at the SA Taxi Art Awards in 2015, their work featured on 10 taxis traversing the main roads of South Africa. They participated in a Fountainhead Residency in Miami in 2018.
Sources:
- Stevenson gallery. Dada Khanyisa. 2022. [O]. Available: https://www.stevenson.info/artist/dada-khanyisa/biography/Accessed: 2022/02/13.
