Chipo Mapondera is a creative technologist of Zimbabwean Rozvi ancestry, exploring her lineage through an intersection of African heritage and immersive technology. Her work channels the ancestral continuum through embodied storytelling, sonic environments and ancestral knowledge, creating digitally facilitated experiences, and designing speculative futures born out of deep traditions. Rooted in ritual, ceremony, and indigenous technologies, Mapondera’s work synthesizes tradition and a multilayered, diasporic artistic expression, offering contemporary portals into ancestral memory and knowing.
In addition to winning the 2024 Innovate UK Career Breakout Award, Mapondera has been nominated for major awards including the 2025 BFI & CHANEL Filmmaker Awards and she was a 2024 AIXR Social Impact Award Finalist. Her work has been presented internationally at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen; NewImages Festival, Paris; Hypha Studios, London; Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub, Oxford, Fak’ugesi, Johannesburg; and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe