PLAYWRIGHT , POET & PRODUCER
The Playwright, Poet & Producer
Cash Onadele aka Aiye-ko-ooto. In over 117 works, Nigerian American, Aiye-ko-ooto, Cash Onadele’s oeuvre spans several creative genres. He wrote and produced The Noble Warrior, Tribute to Wole Soyinka 2024, staged in theatres in Abeokuta and Lagos. In 2019, his 4-part ethnographic fiction drama titled 'Blood of Freedom' launched in USA. 55+ additional literary works followed. They include children, youth and adult stories, screenplays, novels, novellas, short stories, and collections of novellas. Before fiction were poems. 52 anthologies of poetry, he famously cataloged as 'Odo-Alamo Series'. He is a prolific writer, teacher, mentor, and a culture-aware philosopher, poet, and playwright. Cash lives in Lagos and Texas, USA with wife and business partner, Denise Marie. The Yoruba native brings indigenous Juju voice to storytelling. He is President /CEO of SYNDK8 Merchants Ltd. SYNDK8 is focused on creative writing, theatre, films and youth development in arts, culture and black heritage.
PROGRAMS DIRECTOR
Samuel Osaze
Samuel Osaze is a cultural producer, media consultant and a poet who uses his craft as a reservoir for documenting cultural heritage while also exploring topical issues in Nigeria such as: youth unemployment and disillusionment, police brutality, environmental despoliation in the Niger Delta, among other concerns. Stylishly, Osaze fuses: folksong, dance and poetry— three hefty genres, on the same stage during performances. A filmmaker, advocate of artistic freedom to boot, he is the author of two volumes of poetry– The Strange Moon of Yenagoa /Der Falsche Mond von Yenagoa(2021), published by Akono Verlag, Leipzig, Germany and translated into German by the Internationally acclaimed journalist and poet-- Andrea Jeska. In 2019, Osaze was artist-in-residence at the Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. His first collection of poems ‘Aroma of a Burning Bush’ was published in 2014. Osaze believes the best way to realize an authentic African voice is through a coalescence of the past and the present to forge something distinctively original. He is currently a PhD research student at the University of Fort Hare, Eastern Cape, South Africa.