Amy Jephta is from Mitchell’s Plain, Cape Town and works variously as a filmmaker, playwright, screenwriter, director and academic.
An alumni of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab in New York, Amy has worked as a mentor to community theatre groups as part of the Twist Theatre project, has been a voice and acting lecturer at CityVarsity in Cape Town and the Woodward School for Contemporary Art in Vancouver and an invited lecturer at CUNY, New York. As a playwright, her work has been published in South Africa, performed at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, the Riksteatern in Stockholm, and at the Bush Theatre, Theatre 503 and the Jermyn Street Theatres in London. Her writing was directed by Danny Boyle and performed by James McAvoy as part of The Children’s Monologues in 2015 at the Royal Court, London and in 2017 at Carnegie Hall, New York.
As a filmmaker, Amy has three feature film writing credits to her name and a fourth in development, including the biopic Ellen (set for national release in 2018) and the NFVF funded short film, Small Moving Parts. Her most recent film, Soldaat, won the Best Script and Best Short Film categories at the 2017 KykNet Silwerskermfees.
She serves as chairperson for Women Playwrights International (WPI), a global NPO that aims to create opportunities and space for women playwrights and currently operates in over 40 territories worldwide, and serves on the advisory panel for CASA, an annual award that facilitates connections between women writers in Canada and South Africa. In 2015, she co-founded the African Women Playwrights Network, a two year digital networking project funded by the UK Arts and Humanties Research Council. She is currently editing a collection of plays by African women for Methuen and facilitates a mentorship project for emerging female playwrights at the Baxter Theatre.
Amy has been named as one of the Mail & Guardian’s ‘200 Top Young South Africans’. She is also the 2017 recipient of the Eugene Maraisprys for Drama for the play Kristalvlakte, published by Tafelberg, and has been named by Destiny Magazine as part of their ‘Power of 40’ list. Currently, she lectures in the University of Cape Town Drama Department and is co-founder and producer at PaperJet Productions.