Education/ Educator

Genna has a PhD in Drama from Queen Mary University of London and an MA in Theatre-making from the University of Cape Town (UCT). She has taught at UCT, CityVarsity Cape Town, Queen Mary, and the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Genna was awarded an ICA National Fellowship in 2016 to work on MS Independent, a project about Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and creative writing. That same year, she facilitated Poetic License for the Infecting the City Festival, where students wrote poems about their experiences of public transport in Cape Town and performed them in the city centre.

Her academic writing has most recently been featured in Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of The Mothertongue Project (2021) and The Girl in the Text  (2019).

Writing

Genna’s story ‘The Fish Tank Crab’ was shortlisted for the 2021 Short Story Day Africa Prize. Her short story ‘Transubstantiation’ was published in ID: New Short Fiction from Africa (2018).

Genna’s first collection of poems, Matric Rage, was published by uHlanga Press in 2015 and commended for the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 2016.

Her poetry has appeared in The New Century of South African Poetry 3rd Edition, The Common, Atlanta Review, Prufrock, Mail & Guardian, and many other publications and collections.  She won the DALRO New Coin Poetry Prize for her poem ‘The Pot’.

Theatre

Genna won the 2020 CASA Award for playwriting. She co-founded the queer theatre-collective Horses’ Heads Productions with Gary Hartley, and has written, produced and/or performed in the group’s shows. Her plays Wintersweet (2012) and Scrape (2013) won Standard Bank Ovation awards at the National Arts Festival.  

Genna was an international fellow of the Royal Court Theatre from 2013 to 2014. She has been part of The Mothertongue Project’s Walk, a series of performed responses to gender violence in South Africa, since its creation in 2013.

General

Genna was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans in 2013.

Full CV available on request.