Esteri Tebandeke(1964-2026)

Esther Tebandeke is an actress, dancer, storyteller and visual artist. She has been an actress since 2008 performing in a variety of theatre and film productions in Uganda. Her most notable film work was on the Walt Disney Studios production, Queen of Katwe, starring Academy Award winning actress Lupita Ny'ongo and David Oyelowo. Theatre projects have included Conversations with my Mother, which was her first solo performance; Maria Kizito, a play written by Brown University professor, Erik Ehn about the trial of nuns who facilitated the massacre of Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide. She was the lead actress in Cooking Oil, a play by award winning playwright Asiimwe Deborah, which was performed in Uganda and the United States of America. Other theatre roles have included a mentally disturbed psychiatrist in the French/ Ugandan production of The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War as well as a frustrated wife in The Marriage Chronicles. Her work is not restricted to Uganda and she has been involved in projects in Kenya, Rwanda, Madagascar, South Africa, Tanzania, the United States of America, and Ethiopia. Esther is a graduate of the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art at Makerere University where she majored in fabric decoration.