We are excited to share the eight artists who will attend the festival on Horizon’s Nova programme.
This programme is designed for artists with a desire to gain more international experience to help them access international opportunities with networking and development at the Horizon Showcase. Selected by Horizon’s Associate partners – Kakilang, The Cocoa Butter Club, Tara Theatre, and Unlimited – the Nova artists are: Eelyn Lee, Faizal Abdullah, Jessica Lucia Andrade, Nwando Ebizie, Patrick Ziza, Sonny Nwachukwu Symoné and Vijay Patel.
Horizon Nova Artists 2023
Eelyn Lee is a Hong Kong/English artist and filmmaker who has exhibited across the UK including Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. Her films have been selected for international film festivals, including the award-winning, Life and Deaf which screened at the Berlinale in 2014.
Eelyn’s art practice combines collective research, devised theatre and filmmaking to create frameworks for collaboration. She is currently working on Performing Identities – an iterative project that seeks to discover new performance aesthetics for East and Southeast Asian [ESEA] diasporic identities, through the creation of contemporary mythical characters and their cosmologies.
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Faizal Abdullah is a Muslim-Malay-Singaporean theatremaker based in London. A graduate of Goldsmiths MA Performance Making programme, his work explores themes of faith, roots, racial identity and politics, and the decolonisation of mind and body.
Faizal’s UK credits include curious directive’s Deciphering (New Diorama Theatre), and A Couple of Strangers (Camden People’s Theatre’s Starting Blocks commission) that will have its premiere at Migration Matters Fest ’23. Faizal will take his solo show Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? to the upcoming Edinburgh Fringe as an Eclipse Award recipient. The show had a successful run at the 2023 VAULT Festival, supported by Arts Council England.
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Jessica Lucia Andrade is a British South Asian Artist, trained in Physical Theatre and Circus. Over 10 years collaborating with companies such as Tangled Feet, Upswing, Nutkhut, creating accessible large-scale work for outdoor festivals and stadiums. Jessica created The Brownie Club which began as an aerial theatre show to explore brown bodies, how they are perceived and the barriers they face. Since then The Brownie Club has grown to create various multi disciplined shows.
The Brownie Club has been supported by Proteus Theatre and Jacksons Lane, Certain Blacks and Newham Festival, Roundhouse Theatre London, Soho Theatre, Tangled Feet, and Subtopia.
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An unclassifiable polymath, British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie creates Afrofuturist speculative fictions and alternate realities at the intersection of live art, experimental music and multi-sensory installations. She proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for perceptual change, radical care and transformation of the self and community, drawing from science fiction, Black Atlantic ritual cultures, biophilia, neuroscience, her own neurodivergency and Nigerian heritage.
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Patrick Ziza is multidisciplinary performing artist and a dance theatre maker of Rwandan heritage. He creates a variety of work that explores the themes of African tradition and cultural norms, investigating the effect they have on people from the global south who were born or have lived in the western communities most of their lives.
His work aims to engage with unconventional performance settings and platforms to promote visibility and accessibility. Striving to create thought-provoking and inclusive pieces, his work challenges the preconceived ideologies about issues such as masculinity and identity.
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Sonny Nwachukwu is a writer, director, & founder of Gateway Arts Productions based in London. His work is multi-disciplinary spanning across writing, poetry, dance, theatre and anything that lies beyond. His work primarily focuses on the African Diaspora. Sonny is a storyteller that incorporates dance and literature making his work relevant, unique, vibrant and thought-provoking. His academic background in Psychology informs much of his work.
Sonny received his dance training from authentic West African and dancehall teachers. He has performed with numerous Afrobeats and dancehall artists working across the UK and has performed at venues including Sadler’s Wells and SSE Wembley Stadium.
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Symoné is a queer alt-circus/movement artist, director, and performance artist. Her movement work explores what circus is and could be. Her performances fuse movement based skills, such as high heel roller skates with hula hoops, pole dance, and voguing, in skilled and interactive shows. Her work integrates psychology, queerness, the human psyche, nature, voyeurism, and playing with the human gaze. Symoné is a Guinness World Record holder, a member of Pecs Drag King Collective, and always has something new up her sleeve to create a sensation.
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Vijay Patel (he/they) is a performance artist, writer and neurodivergent access consultant. He crosses forms from live art, performance art and queer club/cabaret. The work they make predominantly surrounds cultural identity, making autobiographical/political work to shift perceptions and uplift marginalised, intersectional identities.
