Isack Abeneko is a Tanzanian performing artist, choreographer, musician, researcher and arts curator. He is the co-founder and Creative Director of ASEDEVA (Art for Social and Economic Development in Africa), a Tanzanian non-profit arts and culture organization dedicated to promoting social and economic development through creative arts, culture, and entrepreneurship for community development. Abeneko is also an art and event curator and the Artistic Director of the annual Marafiki Festival, an intentional arts festival that brings together artists, communities, and cultural practitioners. Through the Marafiki platform, he curates and produces several other artistic events and creative initiatives.

As a freelance contemporary dancer and choreographer, Abeneko focuses on live stage performing arts and collaborates on interdisciplinary performance projects. He has toured internationally with his own dance productions and has also taught as a musician, dancer, and choreographer in various international contexts. His works include projects such as Vinyago and Dance Belong: Colonial Biography. He has also collaborated with Flinn Works on productions including Maji Maji Flava (inspired by the Maji Maji War), Fever and Fiver (addressing malaria and touch postcolonial topic), and Ultimate Safari, a 360-degree video installation and performance exploring the discourse of conservation and safari tourism in Tanzania.

Abeneko completed his African contemporary dance and choreography studies at École des Sables in Senegal. As a dancer, actor, and musician, he represents a new generation of Tanzanian contemporary performers while increasingly expanding his practice offstage as a choreographer, songwriter, and curator of artistic projects and festivals.

Throughout his career, he has worked with and been trained by influential artists, directors, and choreographers including Stephanie Thiersch, Germaine Acogny, David Zambrano, Nora Chipaumire, Sophia Stepf (Flinn Works), Musa Hlatshwayo, Opiyo Okach, Kefa Oiro, Patrick Acogny, Vanessa Tamburi, Ian Mwaisunga and Aloyce Makonde.

His artistic practice is driven by the power of performing arts to question and reflect on complex contemporary issues such as identity, cultural diversity, politics, colonialism, postcoloniality, coloniality, and the cultural and creative economy. His dance theatre works have been performed internationally in Germany, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Austria, the United States, South Korea, South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi, Senegal, and across East Africa.

Currently, Abeneko is conducting research and developing a new multimedia project under the CRC “Affective Societies”: International Fellows Programme titled As Far as My Body Remembers, which explores colonial wounds and intergenerational trauma through embodied memory and movement.