Zenobia Simelane

Zenobia Simelane is an academic leader and curriculum architect specialising in film, television, and creative arts education, with over 20 years of experience as a working producer underpinning her academic practice. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Motion Picture from AFDA School of Creative Economies and has spent more than a decade building and leading film and television programmes from the ground up. She is currently Head of School at Media City Academy, where she leads institutional operations, budgeting, stakeholder engagement, and programme development for NQF 6 work-integrated and skills-development courses in film and television, while remaining actively involved in industry production to keep the curriculum grounded in current practice. Prior to this, she spent over a decade at AFDA School of Creative Economies as Head of School and Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Producing, where she held curriculum oversight for factual and fictional content across all disciplines, developed programmes for exit-level undergraduates and postgraduate masterclasses, and managed departmental budgets, staff performance, and assessment moderation for the BCom Business Agile learning programme. She has also lectured in Digital Narrative Film, Academic Literacy, and Film History at SAE Institute South Africa. She continues to consult at both institutions on diversity, inclusion and decolonised student funding processes. Alongside her academic leadership, Zenobia has produced and line produced across feature films, broadcast series, documentaries, and more than 250 commercial and branded content productions for clients including L’Oréal, KFC, Discovery, and DSTV, working with agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather, FCB, and McCann. Her international production experience spans outside-broadcast work with NHK and Fuji Films in Japan, TV Globo and Band TV in Brazil, and Beijing TV in China. Between September 2024 and January 2025, she worked with Dubai-based Good Stills as a postproduction, stills, and gaming development producer and technical consultant on the Riyadh Food Sphere Experiential Museum, contributing to 36 asset pieces spanning animation, live-action documentary content, gaming development, projection mapping, AI interactive mapping, and Unreal Engine asset management, and consulting remotely on hardware and software installation and training for the museum’s interactive systems. Her postproduction supervision experience spans VFX, animation, gaming, AI pipelines and projection mapping and digital interactive museum installations across boutique houses including Tessa Ford Postproduction, Goodstills Dubai and Masters and Savant. Zenobia brings a rare combination of institution-building experience, deep industry credibility, and cross-cultural production expertise across South Africa, the UAE, Japan, Brazil, China, and Saudi Arabia, making her well suited to leading and shaping film and television education programmes in new and growing academic environments.