Experience

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  Sunshine Cinema

  • Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

  • Executive Director

    • Jan 2017 - Present
    • Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

    Sunshine Cinema is a non-profit solar-powered media network addressing youth unemployment in Southern Africa by training and equipping young entrepreneurs to generate income through impact film facilitation and digital media.

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  Makhulu

  • Director, Producer, Camera, Research

    • Jan 2009 - Present

    I have been working with Makhulu (www.makhulu.co.za) in the film industry since 2009 as a camera operator, director, editor, producer and researcher. The company was founded by my fiance Rowan Pybus. A short film I produced and worked on as a camera operator, Amazing Grace, received 6 awards in 2013 including a National Geographic Award, a United Nations Forum on Forests Award, and a Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival Award, and was selected as part of the Durban Film Mart pitching forum in 2013.

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  Photographer

  • Southern Africa

  • Artist

    • Jan 2008 - Present
    • Southern Africa

    Sydelle Willow Smith is a storyteller passionate about media advocacy working across Africa, based in Cape Town, born in Johannesburg. Her love of photography developed at The Market Photo Workshop, which led to a deeper ethnographic enquiry in Visual Anthropology at The University of Cape Town, followed by a Master’s of Social Science in African Studies from The University of Oxford.Her academic research has focused on the politics of participatory visual research dynamics from an Applied Anthropology perspective. She is passionate about audience engagement and experimenting with modes of public participation. It is within the context of public participation where she has drawn together her interests in media, anthropology, and socio-political interventions. In 2017, Sydelle and her husband Rowan Pybus co-founded the solar powered mobile cinema non-profit network Sunshine Cinema . Sunshine Cinema celebrates the power of storytelling to inspire communities to drive social change through dialogue and action. They address youth unemployment through their Sunbox Ambassadorship program by training young people to be media facilitators equipping them with a mobile, solar cinema kit called ‘The Sunbox’. The Ambassadors mobilise their communities to spark conversation; promoting active citizenship inspired by the power of African Films. For the past five years Sydelle has been working on a personal documentary project, focusing on white South Africans conceptions of belonging in relation to settler colonial histories entitled Un/Settled - that has been published in the New York Times and publicly exhibited in both New York, the Netherlands with World Press Photo, and was part of Infecting The City in the Company Gardens in Cape Town where it has garnered a wide range of audience response. The exhibition is currently installed at the VnA Waterfront in Cape Town and aims to provoke and unpack uncomfortable dialogues about whiteness.

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  Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity

  • Global

  • Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity

    • Aug 2020 - Nov 2021
    • Global

    The Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity supports accomplished leaders from diverse backgrounds to uncover and address the root causes of racial inequality and engage in strategic, long-term collaborative efforts for transformative social change. Through leadership development, community building, design labs and narrative change, we support the personal development and capacity of these leaders, and catalyse broader social change activity, based on a view that both are required to achieve racial equity.

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  the Market Photo Workshop

  • Intern/Assistant

    • Jan 2007 - Nov 2007

    www.marketphotoworkshop.co.za

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  Fairmail

  • Volunteer Photography trainer

    • Aug 2006 - Dec 2006

    FairMail, for a period of 8 weeks on the North Coast of Peru in 2006.