photographed by Yolanda Mthombeni (2022)

Nyakallo Maleke is an artist, a writer, an educator and a cyclist from Johannesburg. Her practice negotiates itself through drawing, printmaking and installation. Connecting writing and drawing together, she constructs, configures and maps space, interactions and hopeful narratives, through mark making and materiality. Using the visual language of abstraction, her practice is curious about place making, communication, vulnerability, visibility and invisibility, the imagination, curiosity and play, which are translated viscerally, using unconventional materials. Maleke’s practice attempts to facilitate an expanded conversation about drawing as medium, a material, a philosophy and as a form of research praxis for thinking about existence, movement, relationships and place.

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 is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Western Cape. 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 curated by Boitumelo Makousu at the Bag Factory Artist Studios in Johannesburg.

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