Biography
Patricia Opondo is a public-sector ethnomusicologist and Senior Lecturer in African Music and Dance at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. In 1997 she established an undergraduate program in African Music and Dance, at the then University of Natal, School of Music, and 17 years later this program has grown to be a vibrant and successful Degree and Diploma option, graduating numerous accomplished AMD performers, arts administrators and educators. Opondo also serves as the director of the African Music Project in the Music School, and from 1997-2003 was the cultural producer/curator of the annual African Music and Dance Showcase in Durban. Since 2006 she has been supervising students in mounting the annual African Cultural Calabash, which in 2014 celebrates its 9th edition. She is also the artistic director of three professional touring ensembles Amaqhikiza, Ikusasa Lethu and Izinyoni Ezindizayo who have performed in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Peru, Mozambique, Uganda and in a number of cities in South Africa. She has directed a number of community-based initiatives including a teacher in-service training programme and in 2005 completed an edited 6 part DVD educational series on various forms of indigenous Zulu music and dance. In 2007 she set up a research and documentation unit under the umbrella of the African Music Project, and has been teaching postgraduate courses on Ethnographic and Video Documentation of Ritual and Performance since 1999. The course and it’s undergraduate equivalent, African Music Outreach: Documentation has developed ethnographic, documentary film-makers who are beginning to get international recognition and profiling through the screening of their films at International Film Festivals and academic conferences around the world. She also teaches courses in Public-Sector Ethnomusicology and Community Development and runs a successful Applied Ethnomusicology division in her Department. Her publications include the following: “Restructuring the narrative of womanhood through song: the women dodo singers in Kenya” in the proceedings of the 14th Symposium on Ethnomusicology (1997); “Cultural policies in Kenya” in Arts Education Policy Review (May-June, 2000); “Strategies for survival by Luo female artists in the rural environment in Kenya” in Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas (2002). Among her research interests are public sector ethnomusicology, Africa area studies, music education and dance ethnography.
