OUR TEAM

From a middle-income neighbourhood of Nairobi, Kenya, she grew up a twenty-minute walk from Kibera, one of Africa’s largest informal settlements. For most of her life, it was off limits. The poverty it represented was kept at arms-length, paradoxically understood as both a problem of the state and the poor individuals. Despite being warned away, Caroline imagined the uncertainty, the resilience and struggle unfolding on the other side of the fence.

Trained in material anthropology and the multi-disciplinary rigours of migration studies, she brings to Frame45 her voice and passion for writing radical, hopeful stories. She believes building a just and inclusive future is as much a feat of imagination as of action, that in order to create cities capable of nurturing human (and non-human) flourishing such cities must be envisioned.

Driven by her own history of migration starting in Johannesburg, South Africa, Kiran understands the pressing need for thoughtful reinvention of narratives, especially surrounding the Global South. During her formative years growing up in the US, she has become fiercely invested in social justice causes, coming to understand the complexity and interconnectedness of national and global issues, including everything from migration to police reform.

After completing her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in finance and accounting in South Africa and the United States respectively, she moved toward analytics. Her work has taken her across the corporate US, honed her skills, and broadened her expertise in the number-world.

With over twenty years experience in identifying the gap between a stated goal and the outcome, she is a trained strategist and project manager. Hellen’s interest in human behaviour and cognition, piqued during her masters degree in Communications and Signal Processing, turned to questions of migrant justice and equity.

Based in Berkeley, trained across and between California and Johannesburg and Prague, Tanya is always in search of the (lowercase-t) truth. In a life telling stories about those at the margins for those at the centre, her work revolves around getting people to think differently about the issues they face everyday.

Not quite comfortable being pigeon-holed as a lawyer, policy 'wonk' or a researcher, Aditya's work and passion traverses disciplinary boundaries, embracing his multiple identities and skills. After ending up as a lawyer—in his own words—almost by accident, Aditya has worked for the Indian government, International Labour Organisation, and World Bank. Over the years, he has come to believe that the law is a limited tool for analysing social reality. Instead, he is interested in unpicking and disentangling the relationships between power, laws and norms, and what people actually do in everyday life.

As a graphic designer based in Johannesburg, Fred quips that he was born between an airport, powerstation and a dynamite factory. Perhaps it was being edged-in between these stark landscapes that piqued Fred’s interest in form, and the language and meaning shapes convey. With a background in advertising, Fred has been designing for the cultural industry for over twenty years but has also worked with architects at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, with graphic designers and fine artists.

As a kid, Tatiana spent their time being a delightful nuisance in the newsrooms their mother worked in. Surrounded by all that buzz and activity, a pre-existing interest in storytelling developed into an interest in filmmaking.

She describes herself in militant terms: a gun-for-hire, and a bit of a bulldozer when it comes to dismantling apolitical and whitewashed analyses of injustice and inequality. She is committed to poking holes in flimsy arguments and deconstructing the things we take for granted. This tenacity translates into all of her work, from a PhD on the cosmopolitanism of informal traders on the streets of Johannesburg to far reaching studies of the evolving relationship between the European and African continents. She is not interested in disciplinary siloes or in deconstruction for its own sake. Across disciplines and through creative approaches to information gathering and synthesis, she looks for work that allows her to build.

Awo Tsegah is a Ghanaian visual artist, whose path crossed with us when she came on board for You Will Find Your People Here – find her art across our website. With a background in graphic design and advertising, Tsegah left education with the ambition of seeing her work splashed across billboards and reaching the eyes of the masses. But she found the work to be nothing more sophisticated than sales. She found it limiting and narrow in scope; it wasn’t her work and it wasn’t art.

Born and raised on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, Naadira has found herself living and watching from the peripheries most of her life. She describes herself as an observer; interested in how groups of people and individuals navigate the world, how they negotiate difference, how trends emerge and wane. But she’s not content to simply observe. As an artist and practitioner, she reflects what she sees back at the world.