About Katlego

Katlego Kolanyane-Kesupile is a Botswana-based, self employed author, ARTivist, theatre director, graphic designer, educator, and publicist with over 9 years working experience across these fields. She is a member of the Gaborone Hub of the World Economic Forum initiative: Global Shapers Community, and a 2016 Queen's Young Leaders Awards Highly Commended Runner Up. 

In 2013, she started her first business, Kol-Kes Krown INC., as a means of allowing herself to focus on creating artistic work and advocating for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Batswana through her work. Prior to founding Kol-Kes Krown INC., she taught at both university and high school levels.

Her passion is theatre and the performing arts. She is trained in physical theatre, acting, directing and musical theatre. What sets Kolanyane-Kesupile apart is that she relocated to Gaborone after completing her tertiary studies in Theatre and Sexual Diversity Studies to start theatrical activism in Gaborone.

In 2014 Kolanyane-Kesupile founded the Queer Shorts Showcase Festival - Botswana's first and only LGBT themed theatre festival - under her company Kat Kai Kol-Kes International as a means of affording residents of Botswana a platform to start interrogating issues concerning the livelihood of LGBT persons in Botswana and presenting a dialogue space for LGBT related issues. 

Now in its third year of operation, the Queer Shorts Showcase Festival, boasts a history of 9 original queer themed productions - among the first ever produced in Botswana - and having hosted international performing acts. 

Kolanyane-Kesupile's role in Botswana is not only as the first transgender identifying public figure, nor as a revolutionary media and theatre practitioner, but most importantly, as a mediator between the perceived heterosexual majority and the queer collective within Botswana. Her work has graced national and international platforms and it is her hope to one day "... live in a Botswana where ignorance on queer issues is a choice, not an inevitable state of being."