anthea moys
Dr. Anthea Moys (she/hers) is an award-winning (imperfect) South African/UK artist, teacher and practice researcher.
I am passionate about using the arts and playfulness as critical lenses or tools to learn about ourselves, our relationships, and our positionality in the world. I believe that creative collective shared experiences of joy are highly undervalued as deeply meaningful practices that have the capacity to reconnect us and create social change. As an artist, I use the format of the workshop to explore ways of playing and co-creating together. In these workshops, we learn all about working & playing together, critically thinking about power, listening and leading with empathy and intention, winning, and losing whilst having a lot of fun.
From a boxing gym to a classroom or a conference, I have delivered workshops in many different contexts. Following a keynote address and workshop that I gave at the CounterPlay festival in Denmark in 2017, for three months in 2018, I was invited to be a resident artist and researcher at the LEGO Foundation in Denmark where the local community and I workshopped how to communicate dense information on play through the arts to a wide public. In February 2020 I facilitated a workshop ‘Play to Keep on Playing or Play to Win’ which played with ideas around power at the Wellcome Collection in London. From 2019 - 2022 I worked with Falmouth University design staff in delivering several play workshops for 100 3rd year design students. The workshops improved interpersonal relationships, enhanced self-confidence, and developed a play practice for their creative design process.
Some artistic achievements include: In 2013 I won the inaugural Standard Bank Young Artist award for performance art in South Africa. In 2015 I was part of the JOBURG MASSIVE collective and one of the performance artists selected as part of the Johannesburg Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. In 2017 I was one of three selected performance artists from Africa to participate in the ‘History Will Be Kind To Me for I Will Perform It’ traveling residency project in Norway, Finland, and Sweden.
All the faces you see on this website have willingly consented to be a part of each project and its representation. I am eternally grateful to each player for their willingness to share their energy, passion, wisdom, and mad skills with me!
