I am a multidisciplinary health advocate, educator, storyteller and performing artist working at the intersection of human health, lived experience and creativity. Through my work as a Nutrition Network Coach Practitioner, Sankofa Peer Recovery Coach, TEDx Speaker, podcast host, singer-songwriter and actor, I seek to make health education more accessible, human and empowering. My work is grounded in a simple belief that the human body has an innate ability to heal itself, when put in the right environment to do so.

My work is deeply informed by my own journey through severe anxiety, anorexia and bulimia. Rather than allowing that experience to define me, I have transformed it into a platform through which I can educate, advocate and create meaningful conversations around nutrition, lifestyle, mental wellbeing, recovery and human potential.
I am the creator and host of The Human Theatre, a podcast through which I explore the human experience with leading voices across health, longevity, psychology, creativity and the arts. I also use speaking, storytelling and performance to communicate ideas that can otherwise feel inaccessible or clinical, including through my TEDx talk, “Knowing Thy Voice; The Ultimate Biohack”.

My role is therefore both founder and communicator: I create the vision, produce the content, facilitate conversations, educate, speak and perform. What makes me a rising star is the ability to bring seemingly disparate worlds together (health and the arts, science and storytelling, lived experience and education) and turn them into something that can genuinely connect with people. Ultimately, I want my work to leave people feeling empowered with greater knowledge, greater agency and a renewed belief in their own capacity for change – the take-home mantra being “You are not broken” and “You can heal”.

I believe I was nominated for the Rising Star Award because I have taken an unconventional path and turned deeply personal adversity into a platform for meaningful impact. My journey through severe anxiety, anorexia and bulimia fundamentally changed the direction of my life. Rather than allowing my experiences to remain something I simply survived and became ashamed of, I’ve been compelled to use them as a catalyst to understand health, human behaviour and the remarkable capacity of the body and mind to heal. That journey led me into nutrition and recovery coaching, public speaking and ultimately into creating platforms through which I can share what I have learned with others.
I believe what makes my achievements distinctive is the breadth of my work and the thread connecting it all. I have trained professionally in the performing arts while simultaneously building a career in health and wellbeing; I am a Nutrition Network Coach Practitioner and Peer Recovery Coach, a TEDx Speaker, and the creator and host of “The Human Theatre”, where I have facilitated more than 80 long-form conversations exploring health, longevity, psychology, creativity, purpose and the human experience. I have also learned to use my voice in its fullest sense, through speaking, podcasting, writing, singing and acting, to make complex ideas feel human and to create conversations that encourage people to question what they have been told is possible for them.

I don’t see my achievements as a finished story. I see them as the beginning of a much larger body of work. Being nominated as a Rising Star would recognise not only what I have already built, but the potential for these different disciplines to come together into something with considerably greater reach and impact.
Ultimately, I believe I am deserving of this recognition because I have transformed pain into purpose, purpose into action, and action into a growing platform dedicated to helping people become empowered, both in their health and in their lives.

My vision is to become a leading voice in a new generation of South African health and human-potential leadership: one that is courageous enough to think differently, compassionate enough to listen, and ambitious enough to create meaningful change. I want to build a body of work that brings together health education, storytelling, the performing arts and human connection to help people take greater ownership of their physical and mental wellbeing. I see enormous potential in using media and creative platforms not simply to entertain, but to educate, challenge outdated narratives and give people the language and confidence to make informed decisions.

I also believe South Africa has a unique opportunity to lead a global conversation about health and human wellbeing. Africa is the cradle of humanity; the blueprint of human evolution is here. Our continent is rich not only in natural resources and biodiversity, but in ancestral knowledge and traditions that can teach us something about how human beings have lived, moved, eaten and connected for millennia. I believe South Africa can combine this ancestral wisdom with modern science and innovation to develop a distinctly African vision of health; one that looks forward without forgetting where humanity came from.

For South Africa, I envision a future in which we invest not only in treating illness, but in creating the conditions for people to thrive in optimal health. We are an extraordinarily diverse country with enormous creativity, resilience and talent. I believe our greatest resource is our people, and that the health, education and empowerment of those people should be central to our future.

As a leader, I want to contribute by building bridges between science and lived experience, conventional and emerging approaches to health, different generations and communities, and the worlds of health and the arts. I want to use my own voice and platform to amplify others, particularly young South Africans, who may not yet believe that their circumstances do not determine the limits of what they can become. “Where there is a will, there is a way”.

My long-term vision is therefore not simply to be successful within my own fields, but to build something that outlives me: a platform that inspires healthier, more self-aware and more courageous human beings, while contributing to a South Africa that is healthier, more connected and confident in its own potential.
I believe the next generation of South African leaders have an opportunity to redefine what leadership looks like, not through having all the answers, but through having the courage to ask better questions, to think independently, to serve others and to bring people together. That is the kind of leader I aspire to become.

Over the last few years, I have done something I once believed was impossible; I have rebuilt a life I wasn’t even sure I was capable of having. My journey began from a place of profound suffering. Against the backdrop of severe anxiety, anorexia and bulimia, reaching my lowest weight of just 24kg, I had spent my life trying to understand and overcome my ‘mental health’ struggles through the conventional frameworks available to me. For over 2 decades I was in the standard of care, in and out of hospitals and treatment centres. Then, in 2018, I discovered the carnivore diet. It was the first intervention I had experienced that produced a profound and tangible shift in my health. That experience changed everything; not because I suddenly had all the answers, but because for the first time in my life, I felt alive. And I became compelled to understand why a simple dietary intervention could have such a profound impact.

Why could something as fundamental as food effect the way I felt, thought and function? Why had we separated mental health from physical health when the brain is, after all, part of the body? And how much of what we call “mental illness” might be influenced by underlying biology, nutrition, metabolism and environment?
I began to reverse engineer my own recovery. What started as a desperate attempt to get well became a deep exploration of the biology underpinning mental health and human wellbeing. It fundamentally changed the way I understood myself and the way I wanted to help others.

That has become the central mission of my work: to demystify mental health and move us away from the idea that psychological suffering is a character flaw, a failure of willpower or something that exists purely “in the mind.” I believe we need to look upstream and ask what is happening biologically, metabolically and environmentally, while still respecting the complexity of the human experience.

I have since turned that personal journey into a multidisciplinary career. I became a Nutrition Network Coach Practitioner and Sankofa Peer Recovery Coach, while continuing my professional development in the performing arts as a singer, songwriter and actor. I became a TEDx Speaker, exploring the relationship between voice, the nervous system and wellbeing, and created The Human Theatre, a podcast that has grown to more than 80 long-form conversations about health, longevity, psychology, creativity, purpose and the human experience.

What I hope is inspiring about my story is not simply that I recovered. It is that I became curious about why I recovered and then turned that curiosity into a life’s work. Moreover, I hope that my unconventional recovery story opens more important conversations about critical thinking and questioning ‘the science’. I have taken an experience that once left me feeling powerless and used it to develop a framework through which I can question assumptions, educate others and create conversations that challenge shame. I want people, particularly young people, to know that struggling with their mental or physical health does not make them weak or broken. There is a biology to being human, and understanding that biology can give us new possibilities whilst simultaneously returning us to who we are.

My greatest achievement is therefore not one qualification, talk or platform. It is transforming my own suffering into curiosity, curiosity into knowledge, and knowledge into a mission: to help people understand themselves and believe that they too have an innate ability to heal, when they live a life in alignment with their biology and authenticity.

Recreational activities

Gym, Hiking, Running, Music, Performing, Writing.