Esteri Tebandeke

Esteri Tebandeke (born 16 May 1984) is a Ugandan filmmaker, actress, dancer and visual artist. She is a graduate of the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art at Makerere University.

She has played roles in the films Sins of the Parents (2008), Master on Duty (2009), and Queen of Katwe (2016). Her Broken Shadow (2016) was her first foray into science fiction.

Tebandeke was born in Kampala, Uganda, and is of Teso descent. She is the sixth of eight children, and her family lives in Uganda. She attended St. Joseph's Girl's Secondary School in Uganda, and acted in school plays and dance performances.

Tebandeke started working as a contemporary dancer in 2008. She has performed with various dance companies in Uganda, including Keiga Dance Company, Stepping Stones Dance Company, Mutumizi Dance Company, and Guerrilla Dance Company.

She has performed at various arts platforms, inclduing Dance Week Uganda, Dance Transmissions Festival (both annual contemporary dance showcases), Bayimba International Festival of the Arts and Umoja International Festival, the latter initially as a student and then a teacher for three years.

She has been involved in projects in Kenya, Rwanda, Madagascar, South Africa, Tanzania, the United States of America, and Ethiopia. She performed at La Mama in New York in 2012, Artwater Village Theatre in 2013 and New Orleans Fringe in 2014.

Tebandeke has been an actress since 2008, performing in a variety of theatre and film productions in Uganda. Her debut theatre production, Lion and the Jewel, in which she portrayed Sidi, was directed by Kaya Kagimu Mukasa.^[1] Other theatre projects have included Maria Kizito, in which she played the lead role of a psychopathic nun. This is a play by Brown University professor Erik Ehn, and is about the trial of nuns who facilitated the massacre of Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide. She was the lead actress in Cooking Oil, a play by award-winning playwright Deborah Asiimwe, which was performed in Uganda and the United States. Other theatre roles have included a mentally disturbed psychiatrist in the Ugandan production of The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield, as well as a frustrated wife in The Marriage Chronicles.^[2]

In 2015, Tebandeke travelled to the northern part of Uganda with a group of artists, intending to collect stories to turn into stage plays that will be presented to audiences around the world. The Story Circle Project, which was headed by Jerry Stropnicky, a theatre practitioner in the United States, gave her great insights into the use of story as a mechanism to help people cope with different aspects of life such as trauma.

She has also ventured into directing and worked on a theatre project, Afroman Spice, with the all-female Afroman Ensemble. The project premiered in Kampala in June 2015 and has since been staged at the Market for African Performing Arts (MASA) in Ivory Coast. It was booked to perform in Rwanda, Tunisia and Niger in 2016.

As a teacher, she has facilitated training sessions with other arts projects. Her experience has also involved instruction of children in schools around the city of Kampala.

Tebandeke got her first acting role in a short film by the Maisha Film Lab program, a Uganda-based non-profit film training initiative founded by award-winning director Mira Nair for emerging East African and South Asian filmmakers.

Tebandeke acted in Judith Adong's Sins of the Parents in 2008 and Master on Duty in 2009 by Joseph Ken Ssebaggala.

Her latest film work was in the Walt Disney Pictures production Queen of Katwe, starring Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo.^[3][4] Speaking about the film, Tebandeke describes the impact that Queen of Katwe has had on her:

"Before the film, I was afraid of my dreams because they were so big. But now I am even more scared—they are bigger."^[5]

Mira Nair, one of her greatest inspirations in the film industry, describes Tebandeke as "a luminous person."^[6]

Tebandeke is committed to developing stories from her home country of Uganda and the African continent, which address themes of local significance but with international appeal. She is exploring the possibilities of developing Ugandan content in collaboration with various creatives in East Africa and beyond.

Her films as an actress and director have been shown at the Toronto International film festival, BFI London Film Festival, Luxor African Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival, Uganda Film Festival, Durban International Film Festival, and Africa International Film Festival.

Tebandeke was part of the writing team on a web series being developed in collaboration with film students from Uganda, Kenya, Ghana and Germany. This project was shot on location in Accra, Ghana.

Little Black Dress, her directorial debut, is a short film that was shot on location in Nairobi, Kenya in April 2019. It premiered in competition at the 2019 edition of the Africa International Film Festival in Lagos, Nigeria and in competition at the Luxor African Film Festival.

As an illustrator and cartoonist, Tebandeke hopes to show the world what it means to be Ugandan in contemporary times.

Tebandeke has been married since 2011 to Samuel Tebandeke, a Ugandan filmmaker. She currently lives in Kampala, Uganda.

• Esteri Tebandeke at IMDb