Yenze Theatre Conservatoire
Yenze Theatre Conservatoire took home five awards at the inaugural Uganda Theatre Excellence Awards (UTEA) on 28 March 2026, recognising its 2024 production of She Loves Me, the musical that marked a turning point in the company’s history and in Uganda’s contemporary theatre industry.
The Five Awards!
From 104 nominees across 23 productions in the 2024–2025 season, Yenze and its collaborators claimed awards in five categories:
• Best Production — She Loves Me
• Best Director — Aganza Kisaka
• Best Set Design — Kenneth Kanaabi
• Best Actress — Tayo Shonubi
• Best Stage Manager — Precious Nsimenta
She Loves Me: A Groundbreaking 2024 Production
Staged across eleven performances at the Uganda National Theatre in July 2024, Yenze’s production of She Loves Me — the 1963 Broadway musical by Joe Masteroff, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick, was Yenze’s debut production as a company, marking its third anniversary. The production was mounted through a licensed arrangement with Music Theatre International and drew an ensemble cast that included Tayo Shonubi, Kenneth Mugabi and Amanyire Joel Andrew, among others.
What distinguished the production most visibly was its set design. Writing in the Daily Monitor, critic Andrew Kaggwa observed that what made the Ugandan show stand out from anything previously staged at the National Theatre was its grand set, designed by Kenneth Kanaabi, which transported audiences to a 1930s perfumery, complete with period signage, furniture, and props, on a stage that does not comfortably accommodate that level of scenography. The review noted that the production reinforced the idea that theatre should be a spectacle, and that Yenze’s team succeeded in captivating the audience even before the actors spoke a word.
Kisaka herself described the production as one of the most financially and logistically demanding she had led. In a reflection published on her portfolio, she wrote that “we made history from the set design all the way to the acting”, adding that the team had taken the production one piece at a time, given the scale of what they were attempting for a three-year-old conservatoire.
About Yenze Theatre Conservatoire
Yenze Theatre Conservatoire is one of Uganda’s few institutions dedicated to structured theatre training and production. Over recent years, it has built a reputation for staging both locally written work and international repertoire, investing in actor training alongside public performance. The conservatoire operates with a mandate to develop theatre as a professional discipline, not only as community entertainment.
Aganza Kisaka: Director and ITI Uganda President
Aganza Kisaka, who directed She Loves Me, received the Best Director award, a recognition that carries additional weight given her wider role in Uganda’s theatre sector. Kisaka serves as President of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) Uganda Centre, the official national chapter of ITI Worldwide, the world’s largest performing arts organisation under the auspices of UNESCO. In that capacity, she was also one of the architects of UTEA itself, an awards ceremony that had not existed in Uganda for 35 years before its revival this year.
Winning Best Director for the same production she built the awards platform to celebrate creates a notable, if complicated, distinction. Kisaka has been public about her intention for UTEA to outlast any individual organisation’s involvement, and the breadth of nominees — 23 productions, 104 individuals, reflects an effort to make the awards genuinely sector-wide.
The Awards in Context
The inaugural UTEA ceremony was held at the Uganda National Theatre, Kampala, on 28 March 2026, coinciding with World Theatre Day. The event was organised by ITI Uganda Centre and covered the 2024–2025 theatre season across ten award categories. Public voting was central to its structure: 5,840 ballots were cast over a four-day window, generating more than 42,000 individual votes.
For Yenze, the five awards validate a production strategy that has always prioritised craft and training as prerequisites for public performance. For Uganda’s theatre community more broadly, the result of the evening was a clear statement: there is an audience for serious theatre work, and there is now a formal structure to acknowledge it.
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