Amy Jephta (ZA)

is an award-winning South-African playwright, screenwriter and actor, based in Cape Town. Aside from her prolific writing career in her native South Africa, Amy has enjoyed critical and commercial success with Royal Court productions Shoes, performed by James McAvoy, directed by Danny Boyle, which transferred to Carnegie Hall, NYC and recently “lacerating” social satire A Good House which premiered at Royal Court then Bristol Old Vic this Spring. The production was met with five-star reviews: The Telegraph (5*) declaring Amy ‘a very bright star in the South African theatrical firmament’. Amy is an established screenwriter with four features, several TV story lining credits and an Oscar “nomination” to her name: Amy’s feature film Barakat was selected as South Africa’s entry for Best International Feature at the Oscars (2022). She is currently lead-writing an ITV/Netflix TV adaptation of a whistle-blowing eco thriller set in a game reserve. Amy has been named one of the Mail & Guardian’s 200 Top Young South Africans (2013) and awarded South Africa’s highest artistic accolades, The Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019) and the Eugene Marais Prize for Drama (2017). She is an alumnus of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment Impact Lab and the chair of Women Playwrights International.