Mbali Mthethwa is an artist, researcher, and organiser whose practice explores materiality as a site of memory, identity, and cultural authorship. As the founder and Creative Director of The Herd Studio and  Co-founder of Milasande Institute, she works with traditional beadwork and the archive not as preservation, but as a living, evolving language.

Her work interrogates how inherited craft practices can be recontextualised within contemporary art and design, holding space for both continuity and disruption. Through an interdisciplinary approach that moves between object-making, installation, and collaborative production, she examines the tensions between tradition and modernity, individual and collective identity, and the politics of cultural visibility.

Grounded in South African histories yet in dialogue with global material practices, her work positions craft as both a conceptual framework and a tool for reclaiming narrative agency.