Ntokozo Fuzunina Kunene

Creator director

Ntokozo Fuzunina Kunene is a creator director, costume and production designer, and founder of Umsiko Creative Agency. She hails from Vosloorus, a township in Johannesburg, South Africa.

A lifelong storyteller, Ntokozo’s love for reading as a child ignited her belief in the transformative power of imagination. For her, film and theatre are collaborative acts of imagination — spaces where artists shape worlds together. This ethos has guided her career, where she thrives in cross-disciplinary collaborations that bring new stories and perspectives to life.

Her design work spans stage, screen, and fashion. She has collaborated with leading international artists including Spike Lee, André Holland, Sandra Oh, Jin Ha, Pauletta Washington, and Isaiah Seret, and her theatre work has appeared on stages such as The Public Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre, and The Atlantic Theater. As an educator, she has held professorships at Fordham University, Colgate University, and Hamilton College in New York. Most recently, Ntokozo served as researcher and assistant production designer to her mentor Akin McKenzie on the award-winning film The Woman King, starring Thuso Mbedu and Viola Davis.

Ntokozo holds an MFA in Design for Stage and Film from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, alongside a Fashion Design qualification from Istituto Marangoni in London. Her background also includes a Bachelor of Commerce in Economics, Business Finance, and Law from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg — grounding her creative practice with strategic and pragmatic insight. Her time living and working in New York, London, and South Africa has shaped a unique design sensibility that merges global aesthetics with deeply rooted African cultural heritage.

In this new chapter, Ntokozo expands her practice beyond design into authorship and creation. Through Umsiko Creative Agency, she is developing films, plays, immersive cultural events, and a think tank for African storytelling. She sees her work as both artistic and infrastructural — building spaces where local designers, creatives, and communities can bring their imaginations to life.

For Ntokozo, as long as humans exist, there will always be stories to tell. She looks forward to continued collaborations and shared imaginations that stretch across mediums, cultures, and generations.