Soweto-born choreographer, dancer, and teacher Asanda Ruda has been named the 2025 Standard Bank Young Artist for Dance, a significant milestone in a career that has taken her from the community halls of Soweto to international acclaim.
Ruda’s passion for dance began in childhood, when she took dance as an extracurricular activity. Her natural talent soon shone through. After completing her schooling she underwent formal training at the renowned Moving Into Dance (MID), where she honed her skills. She then joined the MID professional performance company for five years, a period that saw her touring and performing works by international choreographers and her own choreography on stages across the world.
In 2020, Ruda joined the Germany-based Pina Bausch Foundation to perform in a restaging of The Rite of Spring, a prestigious collaboration with École des Sables in Senegal and Sadler’s Wells in the UK.
In 2021, she won the fourth edition of the Africa Simply the Best festival in Burkina Faso, which led to a residency programme at HELLERAU (European Centre for the Arts) in Germany alongside fellow choreographers Bibata Ibrahim Maiga and Tchina Ndjidda. Most recently, in 2024, she participated in the Itrotra Art x Connection performing programme and was selected as the recipient of the Phakamisa Dance Commission in 2025. This emanates from JOMBA! @ The Market Theatre.
“I think it’s really important that performing artists question and give expression to cultural norms and attitudes.
— Asanda Ruda
Ruda’s acclaimed solo work Kemet (Black Lands) has been a lynchpin of her recent success. The piece, which explores the complex terrain of generational alienation, political defiance, and personal emancipation, earned her the 2025 Choreographers Research Residency Award at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. This residency, a partnership with the CN D (Centre national de la danse), is specifically for choreographers working and living outside of France. In Kemet, Ruda moves beyond predefined cultural inheritances to focus on the individual, protesting conformity and claiming her own place in an Afro-contemporary world, set to music and echoes of the past.
Her dance style is deeply rooted in culture, history,and socio-political commentary, providing her with a powerful choreographic voice. “I think it’s really important that performing artists question and give expression to cultural norms and attitudes. The downside of this approach, however, is that you make yourself vulnerable to criticism,” she says.
Being awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance, she says, rates as the highlight of her career to date. “I’m very excited about the opportunities this award offers.”
Ruda performed two dances at the recent National Arts Festival: the celebrated Kemet and Alkamal Alkamal Almutlaq (an Arabic phrase that translates to “Completeness and Absolute Wholeness”). Performed by three dancers, it explores the bond between the spirit and the soul and how they interconnect to heal and revive the physical self. The performance draws upon its title as a kind of prayer — a deep invocation of resilience and renewal.
The Standard Bank Young Artist Awards, a project of the National Arts Festival supported by Standard Bank that celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, has a storied legacy of honouring creators who challenge convention. The other 2025 recipients are Siyasanga “Siya” Charles (jazz), a magna cum laude Juilliard-graduate trombonist; Muneyi (music), whose Tshivenda-rooted lyrics explore universal themes of love, loss, and identity; Modise Sekgothe (poetry), a shapeshifter of sound and rhythm who has taken his dynamic spoken word and performance art to global stage; SAFTA-winning artist Calvin Ratladi (theatre); and Nyakallo Maleke (visual arts), whose drawings depict intricate maps of migration, vulnerability, and spatial memory, expanding the conversation around drawing as both medium and metaphor.
From the July edition of Wanted, 2025
