New York-bound art student defies odds, pain

JOHANNESBURG: “If you have a dream, you have to protect it,” says Gift Nwokorie, a first-year performing arts student at The Market Lab Theatre in Johannesburg.

Nwokorie, 20, who lives in Hillbrow, was recently accepted by the New York Film Academy in the US.

Despite coming from a broken home, she has defied all the odds, including poverty and abuse, to make it to this point, but is in desperate need of funding.

“I am my mom’s only hope,” she said, after explaining that her mother is unemployed.

“My older brother is in prison and is only due to be released in 2016 or 2017, and I have a younger sister who is only 14.”

She matriculated in 2013 from Barnato Park High School.

“We have been living on a social grant, but after I turned 18 I had to make my own way and fund my studies,” she said.

To pay for her first year at The Market Lab Theatre, she took a gap year and did waitressing and promotions.

Nwokorie said that art is underrated and she hopes to get the best education possible as a way of proving that the arts should not be underestimated.

Her parents divorced when she was three and she moved in with her father because her mother was

We have been living on a social grant, but after I turned 18 I had to make my own way

unable to support her.

“I was abused by my stepmother in my younger years and eventually moved back in with my mother,” she said.

Her pain has inspired her to one day open a drama therapy school for “damaged children” who have been abused.

“I am able to sing my pain through my artistry,” she said.

Nwokorie said writers and poets like Lebo Mashile and Zakes Mda inspired her to continue writing and performing her poetry.

“I love imagery through poetry. It teaches you that there is more to life than what we see.”

Her parents are unable to fund her studies in the US. She hopes to leave in June next year to begin her studies to help her family.

“Life is a mystery waiting to be discovered,” she said.