Vulindlela Nyoni was born in Chilimanzi, Zimbabwe in 1976 and attained a Bachelor of Arts in the Fine Arts from the then University of Natal in 1998 and a Masters in Fine Arts from the now University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2006. His Masters thesis was entitled “Representations of ‘other’ in selected South African artworks: Re-membering the black male body”. He is currently working on a PhD in Visual Art and investigating themes around collaborative printmaking. Apart from being a practicing artist, Nyoni also lectures in Printmaking, Drawing, Digital imaging and Photography at the Centre for Visual Art, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg). His main interests lie in the politics of representation and self-representation as exploration of personal narrative through print media.
A lot of Nyoni’s work is composed of symbolic imagery of things in relation to one another on a flat surface. He says, “I see image-making as a language. I see images as words, paragraphs and stories.” To him the experience of reading a story is quite different from one person to another. It’s how you see it and that’s how he feels about his own work when it is viewed by an audience. The viewer makes the sense of his visual narrative.