Yvette Hutchison is working collaboratively on this project with AMY JEPHTA, a playwright who is also a lecturer in the Drama department at University of Cape-Town, South Africa. Through the project we aim to bring together, in a virtual space via a mobile application accessible on feature phones and computers, female theatre practitioners living in Africa, researchers and other interested parties to dialogue and collaborate on their creative and/ or critical engagements with key issues that inform and impact on understanding the lived experiences of contemporary women in Africa.

The app, built by Every1Mobile, will be launched at the Women’s Playwright International Conference (WPIC) on 30 June 2015 in Cape Town. Thereafter it will be accessible at AWPN.org

The application will have three primary functions:

- to allow female artists from Africa to create profiles for themselves and their work, to increase their visibility and connectivity beyond regions, to access one another and others nationally and internationally.

- to highlight events from regions posting each month. This will both connect artists, and allow other interested parties (researchers, programmers, etc) to see key activities happening in the field of performance in various regions of Africa easily.

- to facilitate researchers engagement with artists via forums. Amy and I will post discussions on topics based around our own research, as well as issues that have arisen from surveys that we have conducted with participants through the project.

For further information, or if you have questions, please feel free to mail me at Y.A.Hutchison@warwick.ac.uk