Media City Academy Newsroom

As part of Orientation Week, Head of School, Zenobia Simelane, took Media City Academy’s inaugural cohort on an excursion to the Human Rights Film Festival, introducing students to documentary storytelling within a real-world context at the very start of their academic journey. The inclusion of the festival reflects a considered approach to how students are introduced to their craft. It situates storytelling within a broader social and cultural context from the outset, encouraging engagement with work grounded in lived experience.

In the early stages of any institution’s growth, the partnerships it chooses to build begin to define its trajectory. They do more than extend reach. They signal intent, establish credibility and shape the kinds of opportunities that become available to the community that gathers around it.

Media City Academy’s Open Day in March was approached with a clear intention. To create an experience that offers insight into how learning takes place within the Academy, not as an abstract concept, but as a lived process. This approach shaped the structure of the day. Rather than positioning the Open Day as a series of presentations, the programme was designed to allow attendees to move through the environment and engage with different aspects of the work as they unfold in practice.