Warren Nebe, a former TEDx speaker, is the founder and director of Drama for Life. He is a theatre director, senior lecturer, a HPCSA and NADT registered drama therapist, a Fulbright Alumni and Salzburg Global Fellow. He was the founder of The Company@Maitisong in Botswana where he co-created “My Brother’s Bones” and “Sephiri se Dule”. He was previous managing director of Themba Interactive – Initiatives for Life. His performance research focuses on identity construction, representation and memory in South Africa through an auto-ethnographic theatre-making approach. Notions of identity are explored, through his direction, in performance collaborations, “ID Pending”, “Hayani”, “Through Positive Eyes” and “Morwa: The Rising Son”, each receiving numerous awards. Warren is also a research member of the Apartheid Archives Research Project. Warren’s primary research focus is on the development of a counter-hegemonic pedagogy, a critical reflexive praxis at Drama for Life appropriate for the purposes of Applied Drama and Theatre, Drama Education, Drama Therapy and Performance Ethnography in Africa. Warren also curated the SA Theatre Season in 2010,” Honouring the Archive: Theatre, Memory and Social Justice”, and again in 2011, entitled: “SA Theatre Season: The Personal Archive: Diversity in Conversation”. Warren has chaired the Drama for Life Africa Research Conference since its inception in 2008. Warren was awarded the Vice-Chancellor Award for Transformation in 2013, and the Drama for Life Team were awarded the Vice-Chancellor Award for Academic Citizenship for 2014. Warren is currently directing a ground breaking 5 nation site specific processional peerformance focusing on human rights and social justice for LGBTIQ communities in Africa through to 2017 called “AfriQueer: Who Put the Stars in the Sky?” Warren is currently leading a social change project called “Build a President” – based on the legacy of Nelson Mandela – as a social media democracy education project.
Lucy is an educator, writer and researcher-practitioner, with a doctorate in mindfulness and teacher education. After graduating from Oxford University in 1989, she obtained a PGCE and moved to Botswana to work in education. She also ran an educational publishing company, consulted on educational issues to the United Nations, and wrote many textbooks. In 2005, she cofounded North Andaman Tsunami Relief in Thailand and worked there for a year, receiving her Masters from Bath University, based on the educational programme she implemented. On her return to Botswana, she became Deputy Principal at Maru-a-Pula school, while also training as a yoga teacher and mindfulness facilitator. In 2010, she moved to South Africa to study at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was awarded a doctorate in Mindfulness, through the School of Education. Her current focus is on Joyful Activism, to give activists, educators and healthcare professionals the skills they need to alleviate stress and increase resilience. She runs Heart-Mind Consultancy and leads courses and retreats around Southern Africa.
Juliana Santoyo (they/them) is a mixed, nonbinary femme who walks the red road, born amongst the sacred mountains and rivers of the Northern Andes Mountains located in so-called Colombia. They are bilingual, being fluent in both English and Spanish. A deep feeler, lover, and systems thinker, their path has involved serving community as a 10+ year public school educator & liberatory facilitator, healing artist, restorative justice practitioner, and certified Life, Leadership, and Executive Coach. Juli’s current full time work as Director of Operational Wellness at One Square World draws from a combination of ancestral healing practices, liberatory facilitation, and emergent systems design to explore how organizational systems and practices can live in alignment with liberatory ways of being. In 2016 they founded a Contemplative Peacebuilding program for ex-combatants reintegrating from armed conflict in Colombia, working to explore the personal, interpersonal and systemic practices and policies needed to cultivate peace and liberation on a collective level. Drawing on these same life-fueling explorations, Juli also co-founded the Black Lotus Collective, a contemplative arts healing space for QTBIPOC across Turtle Island. They hold onto the deep belief (and practice) that our bodies are our roadmaps to liberation, serving as compasses for alignment with our wiser selves, with those parts of us that are of this land, connected to the magic and wisdom of our ancestors, the elements, and all of our relations.
Constanza Baquedano Larraín earned her degree in Biochemistry at the University of Santiago de Chile, her Master’s degree in Neuroscience at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and her dual Doctorate in Neuroscience through a joint supervision between the Claude Bernard
University Lyon 1 in Lyon, France, and the Catholic University of Chile. Dr. Baquedano researches mindfulness meditation and other contemplative techniques, employing a multidisciplinary and diversified methodology that encompasses both third-person quantitative measurements—including molecular methods, autonomic system electrophysiology, electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements, and behavioral assessments—as well as first-person qualitative measurements such as self-reports and interviews, in an attempt to provide a “neurophenomenological” approach to the phenomena she studies.
Dr. Baquedano is co-founder and president of the Andean Resilience Foundation, for the conservation of mountain ecosystems, She is also co-founder and vice president of the EcoH Foundation, for the study of human consciousness (https://www.fundacionecoh.org/). Constanza is member of the Mind & Life Institute and the International Society for Contemplative Research. She is currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Psychology at Adolfo Ibáñez University and a Researcher at the Center for Social and Cognitive Neuroscience (CSCN) from the same university, and she has both national (FONDECYT) and international (Varela Award) funds to finance her research lines.
Research areas: Mindfulness and Compassion Meditation, Connection with Nature, Subjective Realism, Non-ordinary States of Consciousness, Contemplative Traditions, Approach and Avoidance Tendencies and Neurophenomenology.
