Born during Apartheid South Africa, to parents who used their creativity as resistance, Ishtar was destined to be a feminist, activist, campaigner and professional troublemaker in the fight for social and environmental justice.

Over the last two decades, she’s worked across movements, countries, and mediums—from fighting for sex workers’ rights in South Africa, to co-designing global campaigns on civic space, regional advocacy efforts to combat HIV stigma, and local campaigns celebrating bodily autonomy. She’s collaborated with everyone from grassroots organisers to major funders, artists to academics, always with the same mission: to make campaigns more bold, strategic, emotionally intelligent and impossible to ignore.

Ishtar is the co-founder of Rogue Union, founder of Mischief Managed, and a workshop leader at the  Centre for Artistic Activism, where she helps changemakers fuse creativity with strategy to challenge power and shift culture. She seeks inspiration everywhere and her approach draws from anthropology, psychology, design thinking, systems thinking, neuroscience, feminist theory, art and the occasional cookbook (she is a self proclaimed methodological slut). 

Her path has been anything but conventional: she’s led radical feminist advocacy campaigns, built cross-continental food sovereignty projects, and even opened a radical coffee shop, bookstore and community space. She sees cafes and campaigns as equally valid sites of resistance and that both signs and sandwiches have revolutionary power.

She’s also a writer and storyteller who uses words as a tool for reflection and rebellion. You can find her work in places like Open Global Rights and Global Public Health, including pieces like “You can’t break a SWEAT – Creatively fighting for the rights of sex workers in South Africa” and “I’m a human rights defender – What’s your super power?”

In 2020, her rogue ways earned her a spot on the BBC’s 100 Inspiring and Influential Women list, and she’s also been named one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans (when she was young-er).

She holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand and undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Organisational Psychology from Rhodes University. But more importantly, her academic journey taught her how to connect dots across disciplines and gave her a lifelong passion for learning, questioning the status quo and smashing the patriarchy. 

Ishtar is obsessed with creative disruption, rebellious imagination, and helping people take their wildest campaign ideas seriously and is passionate about collaborating with those that not only want to disrupt and dismantle the current status quo, but who also want to imagine new, brave worlds and build them collectively.