Zandile Darko
Theatre Maker and Director of All Kinds of Creative Processes
"You need to pick your niche, you cannot be everything at once."
Zandile Darko is an Afro-German theatre maker, actress, writer, and physical performer based in Hamburg. She has performed at venues including Kampnagel Hamburg, Münchner Kammerspiele, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, and Maxim Gorki Theater, and her work has been supported by the BKM Hamburg, Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, and Alfred Toepfer Stiftung.
She studied cultural sciences at Leuphana University of Lüneburg and the University of Ghana, then trained in devised physical theatre at LISPA (London International School of Performing Arts) on an Alfred Toepfer Foundation scholarship. She went on to complete an MFA in acting at Rose Bruford College in London and an MA in Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands — both on scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. From 2010 to 2018 she was a member of Hajusom, the award-winning transnational art project based in Hamburg, and from 2010 to 2024 a member of Label Noir, an Afro-German performance network of theatre and filmmakers in Berlin. She is also one half of the international duo Wet Paint, which she co-founded with author and theatre maker Therese Ramstedt and brought to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
In her artistic practice, she searches for strategies that make space for layered, nuanced, and complex stories, voices, and temporalities. Her work spans performance, mask play, video art, writing, and speculative fiction — often at the intersection of movement, memory, and postcolonial inquiry. Her bachelor's thesis asked to what extent performances can provide a critical counterstatement to official German colonial historiography — a thread that continues to run through her work today. Beyond the stage, she guides people to become aware of the patterns held in their bodies, helping them shift those patterns and move through life with more ease.