Dr Ismail Mahomed honoured with 2026 JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience Lifetime Achievement Award

DURBAN, 25 August 2026: Dr Ismail Mahomed, Director of the Centre for Creative Arts (CCA) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, was presented with the 2026 JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience Lifetime Achievement Award last night (25 August) at the opening of the 28th JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, at UKZN, Durban.

The award was presented by Dr Lliane Loots, curator of JOMBA!, on behalf of the Centre for Creative Arts and the JOMBA! team, in recognition of Dr Mahomed's sustained contribution to South African and African contemporary dance and to the wider arts sector.

Tribute at the opening night

In presenting the award, Dr Loots paid tribute to Dr Mahomed's decades of work opening platforms for artists and dancers across South Africa, the African continent and beyond. She described him as someone who understood, often before others did, that an artist needs not only a stage but a door that opens, not only an audience, but someone willing to make the spaces in which art and dance can breathe.

Through his years of service to the arts and his leadership of the Centre for Creative Arts, Dr Mahomed has helped create openings where there might otherwise have been walls, and possibilities where there might have been silence. “Dr Mahomed’s work has never been only about presenting what is already known, but about making room for what is still becoming building platforms upon which dance makers could gather their bodies, stories, questions and dreams, and take the risks that art requires.”

Impact across festivals and collaborations

“Across festivals, programmes, collaborations and countless encounters at the Centre for Creative Arts, Dr Mahomed's leadership has helped weave connections between dancers, artists, communities and countries, as a bridge-builder, a door-opener, a provocateur of possibility, and above all, a steadfast believer in the necessity of the arts. For JOMBA!, Dr Mahomed's contribution forms part of the festival's longer choreography, one built not only of dancers and dances, but of those who have helped hold the space, nurture the vision, and ensure that the dance could continue.”

In accepting the award, the festival paid tribute not only to what Dr Mahomed has done, but to what his work has enabled: the artists and dancers who found a stage, the voices and dancing bodies that found an audience, the artistic conversations that crossed borders, and the possibilities that became real because he helped make space for them.

The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented with what organisers described as deep gratitude, admiration and affection, marking one of the milestone moments of this year's opening night.

JOMBA! runs until 6 September at various venues in Durban, and a shorter version of it runs a The Market Theatre in Johannesburg from 13 to 16 September.

More information can be found at https://jomba.ukzn.ac.za/