Playwright, performer and social activist Napo Masheane was born in Soweto but grew up in the Free State. She is a well-trained stage practitioner, having obtained a speech and drama diploma from the Fuba School of Dramatic Arts and paying her dues as a stage manager and lighting technician at Johannesburg's premier Market Theatre.

for poetry in 2005. Her spoken-word adventures have taken her to venues abroad and in Southern Africa.

She has benefited from cultural exchange programmes that have taken her to Sweden, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. But it is for her recent play My Bum is Genetic, Deal With It, an appeal for tolerance of cultural diversity, conceptualized by Napo from a need to take a stand against a global talk regarding the perceptions of the female body and standards of beauty imposed by society and media. Napo's continued research among big, fat, voluptuous black women around her community and the world led her to give voice to a subject normally left voiceless.

Fearlessly, Napo Masheane harnesses the dreams, ideas and plans of every woman made to feel as though her body should be fixed or reconstructed and held to an ideal standard of beauty.

Masheane was a finalist in the DaimlerChrysler award