Board of Trustees
Brian Heydenrych
Brian Heydenrych, Treasurer of arepp:Theatre for Life’s Board of Trustees. An actor/producer who graduated in the early 90's with an Economics degree from the University of Cape Town. Although first an actor, where his credits include ‘Boy Meets Boy’, ‘Cabaret’, ‘Strangers on a Train’, ‘Blue Room’, ‘Wit’, ‘Kissed by Brel 2’, ‘Paljas’, ‘Charlie’, ‘Dissonance’, ‘This Life’ and ‘Land of Thirst’, he has worked as the executive producer of Shakespeare at the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre over the past fifteen years, and Freelance Company Manager for Cape Town Opera’s international tours of ‘Showboat’. He currently holds the position of Business Development Manager of the Performing Arts Network of South Africa, a creative industries network body focused on building the sustainability of the performing arts industry.
Shireen Hollier
Shireen Hollier (Board Secretary) completed her National Diploma in Performing Arts (Drama) at the Pretoria Technikon in 1984. Shireen is an established Voice artist, and also teaches elocution and voice production. Together with her husband, actor/ writer Jürgen Hellberg, she heads up Flying Pigs, a corporate and Industrial Theatre Company. To date, she has directed over 70 productions, educational as well as commercial, and directed and conceptualized numerous Industrial and Corporate theatre productions. Shireen is a founder member of the multi-award winning female a capella group Cutt Glas. During her 14 years with the group, she recorded 5 CD’s and performed in over 1000 shows. In addition to extensively touring South Africa, she also performed internationally in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Portugal, Finland, Namibia and Botswana. As recording artist, she has also recorded 3 different educational C.D.’s featuring original material.
Shireen composed and recorded the original songs for arepp:Theatre for Life’s No Monkey Business series of shows.
Janice Honeyman
Janice Honeyman’s work as a director has ranged from critically lauded popular productions to the great classics, and plays created on subjects reflecting deep concern with social issues; from bawdy comedies to the best of contemporary hits from Broadway and the West End. Her work has taken her abroad where, at the invitation of the Royal Shakespeare Company she directed Athol Fugard’s ‘Hello and Goodbye’ with Sir Antony Sher and Estelle Kohler, and Julius Hay’s ‘Have’ in London. She has recently returned from Oslo and Nuremberg where her production of the musical ‘Showboat’ was a resounding success and earlier in the year her award-winning production with John Kani, ‘Nothing But the Truth’, played at the Lincoln Centre, New York, Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard.
Outside of her mainstream theatre work she has always had an avid interest in and commitment to youth drama and development work. She has done outreach workshops in Soweto, Cape Town, the Eastern Cape and London on literature setworks, History, Geography, Self-expression and Life Skills, Theatre-in-Education workshops for teachers, and numerous Children’s plays and touring Theatre-in-Education projects with young actors and pupils, both in South Africa and abroad. She has led drama groups for inner-city children in North London, been Director of Dogge’s Troupe in Kentish Town, UK, run Community projects on London Council estates, run the youth theatre arm of the Market Theatre, The Young Market, worked closely with Robin Malan as assistant Artistic Director of PACT Playwork, and done therapeutic work through drama with educationally sub-normal pupils, adults and under-5 children.
Shaheda Omar
Shaheda Omar B.A. S.W. Hons (UNISA), Forensic Assessment and Child Abuse(RAU), M.A. Mental Health (UNISA). Shaheda has worked with families and children for over 18 years. She is both proud and privileged to serve as a team member of the Teddy Bear Clinic, where she has been since 2000. Although the medical component has been in existence since 1986, the therapeutic component became established when she joined the clinic. Shaheda introduced and implemented forensic assessments and she has since trained all the social workers to conduct forensic assessments. This service has flourished since its inception and has proven to be very valuable to both the child and the justice system. Shaheda was also instrumental in formalising the recruiting screening and training of intake counsellors (volunteers) for the clinic. In 2001, Shaheda facilitated the development of a young sexual offenders programme better known as SPARC (Support Programme For Abuse Reactive Children), which is a group work intervention programme.
Shaheda has compiled a physical abuse and anger management manual and is doing postgraduate research on the young sexual offender. She has presented at national conferences and continues to train educators, doctors and other professionals in the field of child abuse.
Linda Sokhulu
Linda Sokhulu is both a theatre and television actress. She started her career in 2003 when she moved from Durban to Johannesburg to start working for arepp:Theatre for Life. She then started working on television and worked on the Soap Opera 'Generations' for two years, before she moved on to drama, where she has worked on the series' ‘uBizo - The Calling', for which she won the 2009 S.A.F.T.A for Best Actress in a Drama Award, ‘Sokhulu and Partners’, ‘Shreds and Dreams’, ‘Home Affairs’ and 'A Place called home'. Her theatre work includes ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘4.48 Psychosis’, which debuted in Grahamstown in 2007.
Nicholas ‘Smokey’ Culayo
After Smokey completed his national diploma in Performing arts in 1989, he has been actively involved in the professional theatre, television and educational theatre. He worked for approximately 11 years with arepp:Theatre for Life as a Puppeteer, Performer-Educator and Workshop Assistant for external programmes and training workshops. Smokey has conducted drama workshops nationally under Rishile Theatre Projects for disadvantaged theatre groups. In 2007 Smokey started Zondwa productions, a company specialising in industrial theatre, events, road-shows and marketing. In his capacity as a director of the company, he manages the productions and liaises with the clients, both private companies and government departments.
Andrew Henwood
Andrew Henwood is a Chartered Accountant and Industrial Engineer. Andrew began work in New York in investment banking. On returning to South Africa, he helped set up the Progress Fund, a black youth focused private equity fund, on behalf of Umsobomvu, FNB and Momentum. Andrew is a member of Endeavor, South Africa's VentureCorps advisory network. Endeavor is a non-profit organisation that identifies and supports innovative, high-growth entrepreneurs in emerging markets. He also held the position of Financial Director at Hi Performance Learning, a learning consultancy. Andrew currently works in corporate finance at De Beers.
Hannah Sadiki
Hannah Sadiki, a Witwatersrand University Business School Management Development Programme (MDP) and Management Advancement Programme (MAP) graduate, worked as a medical technician for the Institute of Virology before joining Standard Bank as a teller in 1987. Hanna worked her way up and is currently the Provincial Director of Gauteng with her prime accountability being to drive the teams to ensure market share growth and customer retention in line with Retail Banking business directives. Hanna has collected a number of performance awards, including the bank’s coveted Rising Star Award for Excellence, the ‘Oprah Winfrey Award’ in 2005 for caring yet confident, results orientated performance which resulted in her becoming the first black woman Provincial Director, and Corporate Business Woman of the year 2006 by BWA (Business Woman’s Association) Eastern Cape Province. Hanna served as an executive board member of PERCCI (Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce), with a portfolio – ‘2010 within the region’, BWA (Business Woman’s Association) with a portfolio of strategic alliances and advisory board member for the Department of Agriculture in the Eastern Cape Province and currently has the pleasure to also serve as an advisory board member of MBDA (Municipal Business Development Agency), and Standen South Africa (subsidiary of EISS International) Hospitality management Education.
