• Katleho Shoro
• University of Pennsylvania

Katleho Kano Shoro is a South African-born, Philadelphia-based artist-scholar. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in Cultural Anthropology. Shoro is an Honorary Research Affiliate of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative (University of Cape Town) as well as a member of the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP). Her work pays attention to the multiplicity of knowledge and botho (humanness); both of which inform Shoro’s inclinations towards (South) African indigenous knowledge systems, decolonial and interdisciplinary education, philosophies of (South) African aesthetics, and arts-based research methods. Shoro is the author of the poetry collection Serurubele. She has contributed poems to anthologies and journals like Years of Fire and Ash and Colour Me Melanin (South Africa), Brittle Paper (Nigeria), and Pear Drop Journal (UK). Shoro has performed in multiple literary festivals in South Africa, and international festivals such as Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo (Zimbabwe) and Pa Gya! (Ghana). In 2018, she joined Lingua Franca Spoken Word Movement in an artist residency at Northwestern University (USA). She is the co-editor of the themed journal issue “Decolonisation In/And Poetry” under Education as Change (UNISA Press, 2020); The Spoken Word Project: Stories Travelling through Africa (Goethe Institut, 2015), as well as the forthcoming collection of poetry reviews, The Constant Reader: Poetry Reviews by Poets in South Africa (2021). She has also co-curated Overtime: representations, values and imagined futures of ‘classical African Art (Wits Art Museum, 2017).

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