Nyakallo Maleke is an artist, a creative writer, educator and a cyclist from Johannesburg. Her practice is grounded in the medium of drawing, printmaking and installation. Connecting writing and drawing together, her practice focuses on mapping place using materiality and mark making. Through abstraction, Maleke is curious about place making, communication, language and vulnerability, and its influence on imagining alternative worlds. Play is a method that prompts an alternative understanding about drawing, through a visceral language. Maleke’s interdisciplinary practice, attempts to facilitate an expanded conversation with drawing, as a form of research. A praxis of making sense of personal narratives, movement and place. Maleke is currently pursuing an MA in Creative writing at the University of the Western Cape.

She is an alumnus of the Master of Art in the Public Sphere programme in Switzerland (2019) École de Design et Haute École d’Art du Valais. Asiko International Art School, Addis Ababa edition (2016) and graduated with a BA Fine Art from Wits University in 2015.

She has participated in group exhibitions at venues including Stevenson, Cape Town (2017); Modzi Art Gallery, Lusaka (2019), Her international solo exhibition, titled Leaning Towards an Edge that Does Not Leak was held at the John Muafangejo Art Centre in Windhoek, Namibia (2016). She participated in the group exhibition Echo, at Jenkins Johnson, USA (2022) and at the Melrose Gallery (2023) She participated in the group exhibition Punya 2.0 at the Kunsthalle Bern (2024) and has shown at Iziko Museums, Territories Between Us (2021).

Maleke is a fiction writer, and was shortlisted for the inaugural Toyin Falola Prize for her short story titled Eskia in 2021. In 2023 she published Drawing is Still Writing, an artist book with Oriole Press. In 2023 her debut solo exhibition, Making Sense Of The Same Story was curated by Boitumelo Makousu at the Bag Factory Artist Studios in Johannesburg. Her second solo exhibition, To Teach in Ways That Teach Us To Care For The Soul (2025) was shown at the National Arts Festival.

Maleke is the recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2025)

Maleke presented at the 2025 UCT Postgraduate Regional Conference “Margins and (Un)Belonging”.