Live Experience
Creative Director | Cultural Specialist | Consultant
Mak Manaka The Catalyst
Mak Manaka brings poetry, performance, cultural intelligence and production experience into rooms that need meaning, not decoration. He works with institutions, festivals, brands, universities and civic spaces to shape live experiences, public programmes and cultural conversations with depth.
Poetry is the source. The public experience is the work.
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What Mak Brings
Creative Direction
Shape the room
Concept design, programme tone, artistic framing and audience experience for public and institutional events.Cultural Programmes
Build the bridge
Literary, artistic and community-facing programmes that connect institutions with people, memory and place.Workshops & Facilitation
Move from voice to practice
Creative writing, storytelling, public speaking, proposal thinking and artist-facing conversations.For institutions, festivals and brands
For rooms that need cultural force.
Mak is not brought in only to fill a slot. He is brought in to shift the temperature of a room: to hold attention, open reflection and give an event a centre of gravity.
- Awards evenings and leadership gatherings
- Conferences and public dialogues
- Universities, schools and learning spaces
- Festivals and cultural programmes
- Book launches and stakeholder gatherings
- Brand moments that need substance
Poet
Performer, writer, actor and cultural worker.4
Original poetry collections.3
Translated collections.MA
Creative Writing, Rhodes University.
The page, the stage and beyond
A cultural practitioner with public reach.
The work moves across poetry, books, voice, performance, community programmes, creative direction and public culture. That range is the value: Mak can read the room artistically, speak the language of institutions and still keep the work rooted in lived experience.
Bookings and collaborations
Invite Mak Manaka into the room.
For live experience enquiries, creative direction, workshops, cultural programmes, voice work and public-facing collaborations, start with a short brief.