Dani Kyengo O’Neill (b. Johannesburg) is a Kenyan-South African filmmaker, composer, and artist working through sonic and film-based archiving,storytelling and world-building. Their practice brings together the lens, choreography and sonic composition, with performance and dialogues of grief, land and body, somatic memory, tension, tempo and time. Their work is concerned with sound, soma and storytelling as departure points for their craft.
They intentionally work with sound, film and colour theory, magical realism, absurdism, archive, dance and aural imagery to explore and present intersections of blackness, pleasure, shame, memory, dysphoria, displacement, migration, the ocean, hauntology, and spatial politics related to landlessness & labour, and its effects on the body.
Their recent films have been part of Encontro de Cinema film festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as ‘Xam, Xamlé’ in The Educational Web group exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2023). Their audio-visual collaboration with Mpho Matsipa (Harvard/WITS), Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal, “Liquid Geographies, Liquid Borders (Petrotopia)”, premiered at the Venice Biennale and they delivered a talk on ‘The Sonic As Landscape’ as part of the The Gray Centre for Arts & Inquiry’s FARBAR program at the University of Chicago. Their composition works have been curated by Deborah Joyce Holman for “PICO: Un parlante de Africa en America” at Auto Italia Live Galleries UK. In 2022, they were selected as a fellow for RAW Académie’s 9th edition directed by Linda Good Bryant feat. Arthur Jafa, GUDSKUL, Sarah Workneh, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and showcased their film and composition work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia as part of the artist’s programme. Furthermore, their work has been curated by Christine Eyene at Southbank Centre, London, and commissioned by Luvuyo Nyawose for his most recent body of work titled eBhish. They’ve been one of 10 film composers selected for the Film Archive and Music Lab, by the British Council and BFI (2022). They’ve had the pleasure of being mentored by composer and cellist Okkyung Lee (2019), and Argentinian composer and conductor Laura Andel, facilitated by artist Sharlene Khan (2018).
In 2024, they released their first debut collaborative album titled A Seat In Heaven on Jamz Supernova’s independent label Future Bounce, UK. They’re currently completing their MA in performance studies as a Mellon Scholar at the ICA (UCT). One of their crafts that keeps them
grounded alongside their practice is DJ’ing as a practice in archiving, for which they’ve made guest appearances on Rinse FM, NTS radio, Radio Raheem, Worldwide FM and performed live at the La Biennale in Venice.